Academic staff profiles
Anna VaninskayaOutline Biography
Anna Vaninskaya was born in Russia and grew up in the United States, where she completed a BA and MA in English Literature at the University of Denver. She came to the UK as a Marshall Scholar in 2003, and after completing a D.Phil. in English Literature at the University of Oxford, she held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship with the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group and a Junior Research Fellowship in English at King's College, Cambridge. She was appointed Lecturer at Edinburgh in 2010. Anna is the author of William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880-1914 (Edinburgh UP, 2010), as well as over twenty articles and book chapters on topics ranging from Chesterton, Orwell, Tolkien, and Stoppard to nineteenth-century socialism, education, popular reading, and historical cultures. She has edited special issues of Nineteenth-Century Contexts, the Journal of William Morris Studies, the Oscholars, and 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century.
Research Interests
Anna Vaninskaya's research focuses on the fin de siècle and the Edwardian period, and more broadly on the following topics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the intersection between literature and politics, socialist propaganda, working and lower-middle class writing, the 'middlebrow', utopia/dystopia, Englishness and patriotism, views of the past, romance, the fantastic and children's literature, the history of reading and education, the rise of English, Anglo-Russian literary relations and expatriate writing in Britain. She is also interested in intellectual, cultural, and book history, genre, and reception studies, as well as individual authors such as William Morris, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, Robert Tressell, George Orwell, J. B. Priestley, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis. She welcomes research proposals in late-Victorian and Edwardian literature and culture, as well as any of the topics listed above.
Research activity
Anna Vaninskaya is working on a new project tentatively entitled War and Peace: Russian Writers in Britain and British Writers in Russia, 1900-1920, focusing on Anglo-Russian literary and cultural exchanges in the early twentieth century.
Publications
Publications list for Anna Vaninskaya
Supervision
Projects supervised by Anna Vaninskaya
Teaching
- ‘The Making of Modern Fantasy’ (Year 3 Option)
- ‘George Orwell and the Politics of Literature’ (Year 4 and MSc Option)
- ‘Romanticism and Victorian Society 1815-1900’ (MSc Core)
- Undergraduate and MSc disseration supervision
- English Literature 2 Course Organiser, lecturer, and tutor
This article was published on Nov 26, 2012