Dr Ruth Coates
B.A.(Bristol), D.Phil(Oxon.)
Current positions
Associate Professor in Russian Religious Thought
Department of Russian
Contact
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Research interests
Ruth Coates specialises in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russian intellectual history. Her research interests are in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian religious thought, Russian Orthodox theology and culture and its influence on secular Russian thought, and the work of the twentieth-century philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin.
She is the author of Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author (CUP, 1998) and co-editor of The Emancipation of Russian Christianity (Edwin Mellen, 1995) and Landmarks Revisited: The Vekhi Symposium 100 Years On (Academic Studies Press, 2013).
Her most recent book, Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905-1917 (OUP, 2019) is a study of the reception of the Greek patristic doctrine of deification in late imperial Russian religious thought, with a focus on works by D. Merezhkovskii, N. Berdiaev, S. Bulgakov, and P. Florensky.
Ruth Coates has acted as primary supervisor of theses on deification in the work of Vladimir Solov'ev, the early reception of St Seraphim of Sarov, female characters in early Dostoevsky, and the reception of Dostoevsky in the 1890s.
She welcomes enquiries about potential supervision of postgraduate research projects in the following fields:
- Russian religious thought
- Russian philosophy and the history of ideas
- Russian Orthodox culture and its reception in literature and thought
- Dostoevsky
- Bakhtin
Positions
University of Bristol positions
Associate Professor in Russian Religious Thought
Department of Russian
Projects and supervisions
Thesis supervisions
Publications
Recent publications
01/01/2021Pavel Florensky, Early Religious Writings, 1903-09, tr. Boris Jakim
Deification in Russian Religious Thought
Deification in Russian Religious Thought
Religious Freedom in Modern Russia, ed. by Randall A. Poole and Paul W. Werth
The Image of Christ in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Pasternak, by John Givens (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018)
Russian Review
Russian Irrationalism from Pushkin to Brodsky: Seven Essays in Literature and Thought, by Olga Tabachnikova (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015)
Modern Language Review