Professor Muireann Maguire

Muireann Maguire is Professor in Russian and Comparative Literature and co-Director of the Exeter Centre for Eastern European and Eurasian Studies. She is also Director of Research and Impact for the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Visual Studies at the University of Exeter, and a co-Director of the Centre for Translating Cultures. Her book Invading the American Canon: Translators of Russian Literary Fiction, 1863-1984 was just published by Bloomsbury Academic and you can download it Open Access here. 

 Muireann writes:

 I am fascinated by the economy of books - who writes them and why, who translates them (and why), who edits and publishes them - and why! - and of course, who reads them (you guessed it!). Since this is a vast area, I try to specialize in the following areas:

• genre fiction - including vintage crime and detective stories, science fiction, ghost stories and the Gothic novel
• translation history and the stories of individual translators
• Russian literature since the early 19th century and its transmission and influence abroad
• maternal fictions - literature (by men as well as by women) about childbearing and parenthood
• ... and a little bit of publishing history, especially Penguin Books and other firms that publish translated literature.

I have been lead scholar on several important grants (including an ERC Starting Grant and two AHRC grants) and I'm currently Principal Investigator on a British Academy Small Research Grant which aims to compare the problems faced by the Russian-speaking literary diaspora in the 1950s and today (it also enables me to commission translations of contemporary dissident writers' work into English).

As a practising literary translator, I'm also working on a translation of a semi-autobiographical novella, The Life of Adrik Melissino, by the Russian poet and translator G.A. Shengeli, which will be published Open Access by Academic Studies Press in 2027. At the University of Exeter, I teach modules on Comparative Literature, Russian Literature in Exile, Russian Language and more. I previously taught Russian language and literature at the University of Oxford as a Career Development Fellow at Wadham College (2010-13), at Queen Mary, University of London (2008-9) and prior to 2008, I gave tutorials at the University of Cambridge, where I obtained my MPhil in European Literature (2004) and my PhD in Russian Literature (2009). I am happy to take interviews, teach, and speak across many aspects of Comparative Literature, Russian Literature and Translator Studies (the subfield of Translation Studies that focuses on individual translators' lives, working conditions, and motivations). 

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