My research interests lie in the intersection between literary studies and cultural history in the context of the early Soviet Union, and particularly in the relationship between culture and ideology.

I am currently working on a dissertation that analyses the representation of blood in a variety of literary texts, artworks, scientific writings, and ideological and philosophical tracts produced in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, with a focus on conceptualising blood as a creative and productive substance. I use a close-reading approach to argue for the significance of blood as both material and metaphor in Bolshevik ideology, art, and politics, and ask how blood was understood and portrayed during a time of mechanistic conceptualisations of the human body. This work is interdisciplinary and, by targeting a wide range of Russian-language primary sources, aims to produce a detailed understanding of what blood meant in this period of history - a time which was characterised by violence, yes, but also by immense creativity and utopian experimentation.

This work is funded by a Faculty of Arts scholarship from the University of Bristol.