Larissa Ryazanova-Clarke

Professor of Russian and Sociolinguistics

Biography

Qualifications

  • MA (Hons), PhD, FCIL, 

Responsibilities & affiliations

  • Academic Director of the  Princess Dashkova Russian Centre
  • Convener of The Research Unit for Study of Russian in Context
  • Senior Lecturer and Head of Russian at DELC, University of Edinburgh.

Undergraduate teaching

  • Russian Language Society: from Proper Use to Propaganda (fourth year option course)
  • Introduction to Russian Culture lecture course

Postgraduate teaching

  • MSc Translation Studies
  • MSc European Studies

Current PhD students supervised

  • Varvara Christie (PhD), Translation of Substandard Lexical Items in Contemporary Russian Film Subtitles. 
  • Fraser Tew-Street (PhD), Discourses of Language and Identity in Russian Republic of Karelia. 
  • Aldona Iudina (PhD), Performing Russianness in Intergenerational Conversations of Russian Diaspora in Scotland. 
  • Kasia Aleksiejuk (PhD), Names on the Internet: Towards Electronic Socio-onomastics.
  • Mareile Haaland (MPhil) Construction of gender in contemporary Russian media discourse.
  • Katherine Spann (MSc Res) Performing a Historical Self: Narratives of the Kuban Cossack
  • Cathy Ratcliff (PhD) Seeing Africa: Conceptualisation of African development issues in post-Soviet Russian public discourse

Past PhD students supervised

Principal supervisor

  • Gesine Strenge (PhD), Socio-Cultural Reception of Loanwords in Contemporary Russian Linguistic Culture, degree awarded in 2012. 
  • Ekaterina Popova (PhD), SELF and OTHER representations in contemporary Russian Discourse on migration, degree awarded in 2012.
  • Samantha Sherry (PhD), Censorship and Translation in the Soviet Union: Literary Translation from English into Russian, degree awarded in 2012. 
  • Emma Munday (PhD) Identity and Self–categorization in the Languages of Kazakhstan. 2009. 
  • Oksana Morgunova (PhD) Narration and Identity in the Discourse of the Russian Speaking Communities in the U.K., 2008.
  • Lynne Knowles (MPhil), Translation of Russian Postmodern Text: A case study of Tatiana Tolstaya’s Kys’, 2007.
  • Maya Birdwood-Hedger (PhD) Domestication and Foreignization in the History of English Translations of Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”, 2007.
  • James Clapperton (PhD), The Siege of Leningrad and the Sacred Narrative: Conversations with Survivors, 2007.
  • Agata Daleczinska (MSc by Research) Gramota.ru as an Instrument of Language Policy in Contemporary Russia, 2007. 
  • Sally Henderson (MSc by Research), Robert Pinkerton: A Scottish Orientalist in Russia?; 2006 
  • James Hetzel (MSc by Research), Reconfiguration of Federal Structure in Russia under Putin, 2005.
  • Emma Munday (MSc by Res), Sociolinguistics of the Russian Language in Kazakhstan, 2003 
  • Lynn Knowles (MSc by research): The Translator’s Subjectivity and Cultural Difference in the Translation of Contemporary Russian Women’s Discourse; 2001.
  • Bettina Renz The Representation of Political Figures in Commercially Owned Russian Newspapers: Independence and Impartiality After Communism (MSc Res), 2000 
  • Christina Galvin Discourse and Disease: the Representation of Prostitution and Disease in Russian Media and Medical Literature (MSc Res), 2000 

Second supervisor

  • Claire Bielby (PhD), Discourse of the Terrorist in 1970s German Media, 2009

Visiting research students

  • Kalle Kangaspunta (PhD), Jyvaskyla University, Finland Discourse Analysis in the Art Texts. (2010)
  • Alexander Berdichevskis (PhD), Linguistic behaviour of Russian-speaking users of instant messengers (IMs). (2011)

MSc and MPhil dissertations

  • Discourse and disease: the Representation of Prostitution and Disease in Russian Media and Medical Literature (Christina Glavin)
  • The Representation of Political Figures in Commercially Owned Russian Newspapers: Independence and Impartiality After Communism (Bettina Renz)
  • The Translator’s Subjectivity and Cultural Difference in the Translation of Contemporary Russian Women’s Discourse; (Lynn Knowles) 
  • Translation of Russian Postmodern Text: A case study of Tatiana Tolstaya’s Kys’, (Lynne Knowles)
  • Reconfiguration of Federal Structure in Russia under Putin (James Hetzel)
  • Sociolinguistic situation in Kazakhstan (Emma Gray)
  • Robert Pinkerton: A Scottish Orientalist in Russia? (Sally Henderson)
  • Gramota.ru as an Instrument of Language Policy in Contemporary Russia (Agata Daleczynska)

Research summary

Dr Ryazanova-Clarke's scholarship lies is in broadly defined socio-cultural linguistics in its relation to Russian. This includes

  • sociolinguistics
  • discourse and critical discourse
  • analysis
  • linguistic anthropology
  • metaphorical studies
  • literary poetics
  • history of linguistic ideas and language policy

She is particularly interested in post-Soviet subjectivity as reflected, constructed and performed in discourse, and in application of theories of post-colonialism, globalism and cosmopolitanism to the post-Soviet phenomenon of global Russian. She welcomes postgraduate applications in these and similar fields.

Project activity

Dr Ryazanova-Clarke is Editor of ‘Russian Language and Society’ book series at Edinburgh University Press. For a number of years, She has been Fellow of Institute of Linguists and an international reviewer for Shota Rustaveli National Foundation for Humanities of Georgia.

Since 2005, she has been an expert participant in two international projects on the Russian language funded by Arts Funding Council of Norway:

Currently she is working on the following research projects:

1. Liquid Russian: Discourses of Identity in Post-Soviet Russia (a monograph in preparation);

2. Global Russian. The project includes the following academic fora and outputs:

  • International conference ‘The Russian Language outside the Nation’ (Russian in Context, Edinburgh 2010).
  • An edited volume The Russian Language outside the Nation: Speakers and Identities, contracted by Edinburgh University Press.
  •  ‘In the Shadow of Global Languages: Scotland and Belarus’: A knowledge transfer conference and round table with the participation of leading academics in language policy of Belarusian and Scots and stakeholders from the two countries, 15 March 2012, the Princess Dashkova Russian Centre. Funded by a Knowledge Transfer grant.
  • ‘Global Russian: Towards developing new paradigms’. A round table planned for 2013. 

View all 37 publications on Research Explorer

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