Two members of Univ have been appointed trustees of Pushkin House, the UK’s oldest independent Russian cultural centre, based in Bloomsbury, London.

Pushkin House is an arts, cultural and social space that explores, challenges and debates Russian culture and identity today.

Professor Polly Jones is the Schrecker-Barbour Tutorial Fellow in Slavonic and East European Studies at Univ and Professor of Russian at Oxford. She teaches a wide range of modern Russian literature, culture and language at undergraduate and graduate level for the faculty and College, including specialist courses on Gulag literature and late Soviet literature. Much of her research, including her two monographs, has concerned the ways that memories of Soviet and Russian experiences were articulated in Soviet-published, samizdat and tamizdat narratives in the Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev eras. She is now increasingly interested in the literature and culture of the Putin era, especially its intersections with contemporary memory politics of the Stalinist and Soviet past. She recently completed a book on Gulag literature from the 20th to the 21st century, and is exploring a new project on contemporary political prisoner narratives in Russian and Ukrainian literature and other media. She is also working on the collaborative project, The 101st kilometre. Provincial Marginality from Stalin to Gorbachev, which explores the migration and settlement patterns and communities produced by Soviet restrictions on residency in major Russian, Ukrainian and Latvian cities for Gulag returnees and other “marginals”.

Ed Hicks (2008, Modern Languages – Russian and Czech) is a partner and general counsel at a US-based investment firm. He was previously an attorney in the London office of a US law firm, working on a range of complex cross-border acquisitions and financings. He has been deeply involved in pro bono legal representation and has represented clients from across the world in a number of high-profile charity matters. At Univ, he studied under Polly Jones and he went on to do a Master’s degree in Russian, Central European, and East European and Eurasian Studies at Harvard.

Published: 2 July 2024

Explore Univ on social media