Dave Weller

I am currently in the third year of my PhD in ‘World and Comparative Literature’ in the department of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies, based remotely in London.

The subject of my thesis is ‘The poet in the poetry of Ida Nappelbaum’. My research interests are related to the development of Soviet literature and poetry and how the concepts of literary identity and mythopoeticism enable a thematic as well as chronological and biographical reading of individual writers. In addition to Ida Nappelbaum, I am interested in other poets who spent their earliest years in the Sounding Shell studio in Petrograd/St Petersburg in the early 1920s, including Frederika Nappelbaum, Olga Ziv, Vera Lurie, and Konstantin Vaginov and the subsequent development of their literary careers.

I completed a BSc in Geography at the University of Salford in 1986 and an MSc in Social Philosophy at the London School of Economics in 1987.