Wendy Rosslyn
 

Wendy Rosslyn

Wendy Rosslyn, a graduate of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, was appointed to an assistant lectureship at the University of Nottingham in 1971, to teach 18th-century Russian literature in place of Gerry Smith. Her early research was principally on 20th-century Russian poetry, and she was awarded a PhD from the University in 1989 for her publications on Akhmatova.

In the same year, Wendy organised an international symposium, the Anna Akhmatova Centenary Conference, which involved distinguished scholars, and resulted in the publication of two volumes of articles.  The outstanding Soviet poet Joseph Brodsky, who had been mentored by Akhmatova, sent a new poem to the conference with permission for its publication. In 1992, during a year’s sabbatical and teaching at the University of Marburg, Wendy translated Anatolii Naiman’s Remembering Anna Akhmatova. This book was awarded the Heldt Prize of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies for the best translation by a woman in Slavic Studies.

Wendy extended her research on Russian poetry to earlier periods, and in 1996 published her seminal book on Anna Bunina (1774-1829). She then moved on continued to research writing and translation by other Russian women of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and women’s social history of the period. Her last monograph, Deeds Not Words (2007) was an equally ground-breaking study of the earliest organised women’s philanthropy in Russia.

Wendy taught Russian language and Russian poetry, including a module on intertextuality in Pushkin and Akhmatova. As a long-serving admissions tutor she was aware of the importance of innovations in the curriculum and she created and taught modules on Interpreting and Translating and Russian for Business Situations. She was appointed Professor in 2002, and served as Head of Department from 2005 to 2008. Now an Emeritus Professor, she is researching the international humanitarian aid operations which saved millions of lives in the famine in Soviet Russia in the early 1920s.