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University of Oxford
School of Geography and the Environment

 School of Geography and the Environment

Dr Elena Katz

Academic Profile

Dr Elena Katz joined the School in March 2010 to work on the AHRC-funded project "Penality and the Social Construction of Gender in Post-Soviet Russia: the Impact on Prisoners' Relatives of Their Encounters with Penal Russia". As Max Hayward Research Fellow in Russian Literature at St Antony's College, Oxford she completed her first book on representations of Jews in Russian literature and culture which came out in 2008. Her academic career stretches back to her home country, the Republic of Moldova, where she obtained her undergraduate degree in history from the Moldavian State University in Kishinev. She embarked on postgraduate Jewish studies at Oxford, and received her MA with distinction in Modern Jewish Studies at Leeds. Elena gained a doctorate in literature at Southampton University in 2004. She was then awarded an Academic Jewish Studies in Europe Fellowship at University College London in 2004-2005.

Current Research

Her research focuses on the perceptions of various 'others' in Russian literature, history and culture. She is interested in issues of Russian identity, examining how Russians assess 'what it is to be Russian' while answering 'what is it to be the other'. Her research seminar series at St Antony's "Them" and "Us" in the Russian Imagination explored the issues of 'other-ization' and the discourses of identity in past and present Russian society in relation to different major and minor Others such as the West, women, and various social and ethnic groups. This particular project will allow her to apply her interests in the issues of identity, society and marginalisation to penal Others and groups associated with them.

Selected Publications

Publications include her book Neither with Them, Nor without Them. The Russian Writer and the Jew in the Age of Realism (2008), academic and newspaper articles, reviews and a literary novella.