David Norris was appointed Head of Department in 2009. He graduated from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies with a BA in Serbo-Croatian Language and Literature in 1980. He began lecturing at the University of Nottingham, Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies, in January 1981 where he also worked on his doctoral thesis. He was awarded my PhD in 1989 on the representation of time in the novels of Miloš Crnjanski. He was appointed Associate Professor in 1999.
David’s main teaching interests are in modern cultural studies in the region of former Yugoslavia and cultural and literary theory, while he also teaches translation from Serbian/Croatian language into English for second and final-year students. His interests in language teaching have led to the publication of the textbooks Teach Yourself Croatian, and with Dr Vladislava Ribnikar, Teach Yourself Serbian.
His latest monograph is entitled Haunted Serbia: Narratives of Memory, History and War. It represents a study of literature from the death of Tito in 1980 to the twenty-first century. The book is an analysis of narrative structures and stories which are typical for modern historical literature and memory fiction, a kind of sublime grotesque.