Frank Seeley was appointed Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Slavonic Languages in 1957. He had graduated from Balliol College, Oxford in 1933, and had then held teaching posts at Oxford, Coventry’s Technical Institute and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London.
Though the focus of much of his research was Dostoevsky, he also taught the beginners Russian course, subsequently publishing The Gateway Russian Course with Helen Rapp. He also taught courses on Russian life and history, Pushkin and Lermontov, and the 19th-century Russian novel.
During his ten-year tenure, the department doubled in size. In 1957, it comprised of just four members of staff and about 35 students, but by 1967 this had grown to eight staff and about 70 students.
In 1963 Frank spent a year on sabbatical as Visiting Professor of Russian Literature at Columbia University, New York City. He eventually decided to make the move to America a permanent one, and left in 1967 to become Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. In a special edition of Slavonica, on the occasion of the department's sixtieth anniversary, Professor Seeley commented:
“I think we were by then widely recognised as one of the best Russian departments in the country. And as I look back… Nottingham seems to me the happiest of all the departments I have worked in. Happy in the spirit and teamwork of its staff; happy in the relations between its students and staff; happy in the quality – personal and intellectual – of its students, whose varied achievements in life continue to rebound to the honour of the department and some of whom I am fortunate to count among my friends.”
In 1971, he left Pennsylvania and took up a professorship at the Binghamton campus of the State University of New York, where he remained until his retirement. He died at his home in Texas in 2000, aged 88.