Professor Muireann Maguire

Muireann Maguire is Professor in Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter. She is Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded Horizon 2020 project 'RusTRANS: The Dark Side of Translation: 20th and 21st Century Translation from Russian as a Political Phenomenon in the UK, Ireland, and the USA,' grant agreement no. 802437. This project, which is active until December 2023, explores the dynamics of Russian-English literary translation through a series of historical and/or contemporary case studies.

Professor Maguire's other research interests include gender studies, specifically the depiction of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding in Russian and Western literature; her book Hideous Agonies: Myths of Maternity in Russian and Comparative Literature is in progress. In 2021-22, she is Principal Investigator on an AHRC Networking Grant, 'Salt Babies: Narrating Maternity in Russian and Comparative Literature'.

She is a member of the University of Exeter's new Centre for Classical Reception and is working on an article on classical reception among Lev Tolstoy's literary contemporaries. She maintains an interest in contemporary Russian literature, in particular the fiction of Vladimir Sharov and Evgenii Vodolazkin; she has recently published articles/book chapters on both.

In 2021, Professor Maguire co-edited (with Timothy Langen) an Open Access edited volume called Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature, based on the idea of "anticipatory plagiarism" as applied to Russian literature and previously explored at this conference, organized by Dr Maguire. The book may be downloaded here.

She has taught courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature and on comparative literature. Her book Stalin’s Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature (Peter Lang, 2012) examines the unexpected interaction between Soviet Socialist Realism and the European Gothic tradition. Other publications are listed below. Professor Maguire is also active as a freelance translator from Russian to English: a collection of Russian twentieth-century ghost stories, Red Spectres, was published in 2012. A second anthology, White Magic: Russian Emigre Tales of Mystery and Terror, appeared in 2021 from Russian Life.

Professor Maguire's published articles and book chapters include:

• “Master and Manxman: Reciprocal Plagiarism in Tolstoy and Hall Caine”, in Muireann Maguire and Timothy Langen, eds. Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021).
• ‘Dostoevsky’s Forgotten Children: Lost Babies and Baby Loss in The Adolescent’, in Slavonic and East European Review 99:1 (2021), pp. 98-123. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.99.1.0098
• 'From Dostoevsky to Yeltsin: Failed Translations and Russian Literary Landings in the Irish Language,’ in Rus: Revista de Literatura e Cultura Russa 11:17 (2021), pp. 1-39. DOI: https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2317-4765.rus.2020.178520
• ‘Climbing the Mountain and Crossing the Wall: Translating Alisa Ganieva and Guzel’ Yakhina’, in a special issue of the UK Institute of Translation and Interpreting Research Network eBook, ed. by H. Vassallo and O. Castro, 2020
• “Time Machines and Metamorphoses: H.G. Wells’s Influence on Mikhail Bulgakov and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky”, in Galya Diment, ed. “The Eastern Wall of Europe”: H.G. Wells and All Things Russian (Anthem: London, 2019), pp. 31-49.
• “Lazarus on the Ark: Heterotopias in the Novels of Vladimir Sharov and Evgenii Vodolazkin”, in Per-Arne Bodin and Mikhail Suslov, eds. The Post-Soviet Politics of Utopia: Language, Fiction and Fantasy in Modern Russia (Bloomsbury/I.B. Tauris: London, 2019), pp. 81-101.
• ‘Institutional Gothic in the novels of Vladimir Sharov and Evgenii Vodolazkin’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 61:4 (2019), pp. 420-38. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00085006.2019.1648986
• “The little man in the overcoat: Gogol and Krzhizhanovsky”, in Russian Writers and the Fin de Siècle: The Twilight of Realism, ed. by K. Bowers and A. Kokobobo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 180-96.
• 'Aleksei N. Tolstoi and the Enigmatic Engineer: A Case of Vicarious Revisionism', Slavic Review (72:2, Summer 2013)
• 'The Wizard in the Tower: Iakov Brius and the Representation of Alchemists in Russian Literature', Slavonic and East European Review (90:3, July 2012), pp. 401-427.
• 'Crime and Publishing: How Dostoevskii Changed the British Murder', chapter in A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture, ed. Anthony Cross (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012).
• ‘Ghostwritten: Reading Spiritualism and Feminism in the Works of Rachilde and Vera Kryzhanovskaia-Rochester’, Modern Language Review (106: 2, 2011), pp. 313-332.
• ‘Post-Lamarckian Prodigies: Evolutionary Biology in Soviet Science Fiction’, New Zealand Slavonic Journal (43: 2009), pp. 23-54.
• ‘A “dreadful predilection”: The Gothic-Fantastic in Soviet Socialist Realist Literature’, Gothic Studies (13:1, May 2011), pp. 75-94.
• ‘“Kto umeet zhit’ obmanom”: Wizards and Diviners in Late Eighteenth-Century Russian Theatre’, Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia Newsletter No. 34 (July 2006).
• Articles on ‘Russian Gothic’ and ‘Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii’ for the online Literary Encyclopedia (www.litencyc.com).

She has co-edited special issues of Tolstoy Studies Journal (XXVII, 2015), Science Fiction Film and Television (8:2, 2015), and Studies in East European Thought (63:2, 2011). Professor Maguire regularly reviews for Modern Language Review and the TLS, amongst other publications.

Biography:

Muireann Maguire is Senior Lecturer in Russian at the University of Exeter. She was Career Development Fellow in Russian Literature and Culture at Wadham College, Oxford, between 2010 and 2013, and has previously taught at Queen Mary College, University of London and at the University of Cambridge. She has a PhD from the University of Cambridge (2009) and a BA (Hons) in European Studies from Trinity College Dublin (2003).

Research supervision:

I am happy to supervise research on various cross-cultural and/or interdisciplinary themes, as well as topics relating to Russian literature and/or the study of maternal fictions. These include:

• Russian nineteenth-century realist writers, including Dostoevsky and Tolstoy
• Literary translation from Russian to English
• Gender studies (in the context of Russian literature)
• Childbirth narrative in Russian and comparative literature
• Women's writing (including maternal fictions) in Russian and Eastern European literature
• Russian science fiction, including utopian and dystopian fiction
• Gothic literature (in the Russian context)
• Socialist realism (in the Russian context)

Please contact me by email if you would like to discuss working with me.