Monica Partridge was appointed to the Chair and as Head of Department in 1967, the first female professor ever to be appointed by the University. She had read French at University College, Nottingham, but had become interested in Russian during World War II and had studied with Professor Simon Boyanus, a former actor and founder of schools of phonetics at Moscow and Leningrad. She then worked for Boyanus at his school in London and undertook postgraduate study and served as an assistant lecturer at UCL.
She joined Nottingham University College’s Department of Slavonic Languages as a tutorial assistant under Janko Lavrin in 1947. At his suggestion, she began working on her Doctorate “Alexander Herzen: A Study of his years in Russia 1812-1847”, and in 1949, when the Scarbrough Report recommended an additional lectureship in Russian at Nottingham, Lavrin appointed her as Assistant Lecturer to work alongside him.
Janko had encouraged her to become involved in regular English summer schools in Slovenia, and the contacts she made helped establish links with Universities there. These eventually led to the appointment of a series of lectors and lectrices in Serbo-Croat from the University of and Ljubljana from the early 1970s. In return, Zagreb made provision for The University of Nottingham students reading Serbo-Croat to spend periods of study there, with Ljubljana offering the same for those who chose to study Slovene.
The editors of a collection of essays presented to her on the occasion of her 75th birthday noted that she ‘was a passionate believer not only in the importance of Russian teaching but also the value of the cultures and languages of other East European countries’. Her most significant contributions to scholarship were arguably her pioneering works on Herzen, on whom she was a recognized authority.
Following her retirement in 1980, she was made an Emeritus Professor of The University of Nottingham. In the same year her achievements were also recognised internationally, when she was awarded the Order of the Yugoslav Flag with a Gold Star for her promotion of Yugoslav studies in Britain. Monica died in 2008, leaving a generous legacy to the department in her will, the Partridge Bequest Fund. It continues to support undergraduates, postgraduates and staff in activities which enable contact with Russia and the Slavonic world.