Josephine von Zitzewitz gained her DPhil in Russian Literature from the University of Oxford in 2010 and has since held research and teaching posts at Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol and Tromsø (Norway). She is presently researching contemporary Russian poetry on the internet, including practices such as self-publishing, the rise of literary journals on the web, and the relationship between poet and translator. She is also a translator, mostly of poetry, and mostly published on the internet. 

Teaching

Dr von Zitzewitz lectures for FHS Papers VIII and XI and is Convenor of  the MPhil Special Subject “Gender and Representation in Russian Culture from 1800”. 

She supervises candidates for Prelims Papers III and IV and FHS Papers VIII, X, XI and XII. 

She also teaches Translation from Russian into English. 

Research Interests

Josephine von Zitzewitz’s current main research interest is Russian poetry of the 20th and 21st century, including literary communities on the internet and the practice and theory of poetry translation. She has extensive experience studying late Soviet literature, in particular ‘underground’ literature of the 1970s, and a lively interest in Russian religious thought and its effect on literature.

Selected Publications

• The Culture of Samizdat: Literature and Underground Networks in the Late Soviet Union (London: Bloomsbury, 2020)
• Poetry and the Leningrad Religious-Philosophical Seminar 1976-1980:  Music for a Deaf Age (Oxford: Legenda/MHRA and Routledge, 2016)
• “Young Russophonia: New Literature in Russian”, editorial, co-written with Hilah Kohen, Young Russophonia - Words without Borders February 2021 https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/february-2021-new-writing-in-russian-young-russophonia-new-literature-in-ru
• “Reading Samizdat” in Reading Russia: A History of Reading in Modern Russia, ed. by Damiano Rebecchini, Raffaella Vassena (Ledizioni, Milan 2020) 
• “The Leningrad Neo-modernists” in A Handbook of the Soviet Cultural Underground, ed. by Mark Lipovetsky, Tomáš Glanc, Maria Engström, Ilja Kukuj and Klavdia Smola (Oxford: OUP, forthcoming 2021)
• “Galina Rymbu‘s, ‘Moia vagina’, June 2020”, in Internationale Zeitschrift fuer Kulturkomparatistik No 5 (forthcoming 2022) 
• “The Self-Publisher”, in The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature, ed. by Simon Franklin, Rebecca Reich and Emma Widdis (Cambridge: CUP, forthcoming 2022)