Dr Ruth Coates

Senior Lecturer

(BA 1986, DPhil 1994) graduated in Modern Languages (German and Russian) from the University of Bristol in 1986, and obtained a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 1994. She held a Laming Junior Fellowship at Queen’s College, Oxford (1992-94), during which time she was resident in Russia. She then held temporary lectureships at the University of Manchester (1995-97) and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London (1997-99). She joined the Russian department at Bristol in 1999.

Ruth Coates specialises in nineteenth-century Russian literature and intellectual history. Her research interests are in the work of the twentieth-century philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin; in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian thought; and in Russian Orthodox culture and its influence on secular Russian thought. She has edited a book entitled The Emancipation of Russian Christianity, and is the author of Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author.

In 2009 she organised the BIRTHA-sponsored 'Vekhi Centenary Conference 1909-2009'. It took place in Wills Hall on 7-9 July and was attended by Slavists and historians from Britain, Europe, Russia, and the United States.

She teaches units on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Silver Age Philosophy and Orthodox Culture. She also contributes to the Department's Russian language teaching at all levels.

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