Professor Derek Offord

(BA (Cantab) 1968, PhD (LSE) 1974) was a British Council Scholar at Moscow University for the academic year 1972-73. He worked at the University of Wales at Aberystwyth from 1974-75 and has been at Bristol since 1975.

He is a specialist in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian history, thought and literature.  He has published books on the history of the revolutionary movement in its Populist phase and on the debates in the intelligentsia in the middle of the nineteenth century, especially between its radical wing and its liberal and romantic conservative wings.  In his most recent monograph, Journeys to a Graveyard (2006), he explores the way in which the accounts of Russian writers travelling in the west over two centuries from the early-modern period to the late tsarist period served to shape notions of national identity as Russia entered the European world.  He has also published a study of the ambivalent attitudes of the nineteenth-century Russian socialist Herzen towards the western capitalist world, together with an edited version of previously unpublished correspondence between Herzen and the banker James de Rothschild which he discovered in the French national archive.

Together with William Leatherbarrow he has co-authored and co-edited a new History of Russian Thought, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.

He is also the author of two widely used books on the modern Russian language.

Projects on which he is currently working include an examination of the role of non-fictional prose in nineteenth-century Russia and a multidisciplinary history of the French language in Russia from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth century.

His undergraduate teaching in recent years has included units on the following subjects: Russian culture in the ages of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great; nineteenth-century Russian thinkers (including the Slavophiles, Westernisers, nihilists and Populists); the classical Russian novelists (especially Dostoevsky and Turgenev); and the accounts of pre-revolutionary Russia written by Western travellers. He has also contributed to the Department's Russian language programme at all levels.

During the 1980s he played a leading role in the organisation of educational exchange between Britain and the USSR. From 2004 to 2007 he was convenor of the Nineteenth-century Study Group of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES). In RAE 2001 he served as a member of the panel for Russian and East European Languages and in RAE 2008 as chair of the equivalent sub-panel. He is currently serving as Director of The Bristol Institute for Research in the Humanities and Arts (BIRTHA) and as Co-President of The British-French Association for the Study of Russian Culture.

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