Dr James Rann
- Senior Lecturer (School of Modern Languages & Cultures)
email:
James.Rann@glasgow.ac.uk
pronouns:
He/him/his
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8397-4502Biography
While I am officially James Rann, I am most often known as Jamie Rann and most of my less academic work has appeared under that name. It's like having a very bad secret identity.
I'm lucky that I've been able to turn my life-long interest in the languages and cultures of the Russian Empire, Soviet Union and their successor states into not just one job, but many, and as well as being a researcher and teacher, I have worked as a translator, journalist, literary agent and more.
Before joining the University of Glasgow, I worked at the universities of Birmingham, Oxford, Queen Mary University of London, and UCL, where I completed my doctoral research at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
Until I succumbed to the irresistible glamour of academia, I worked on different projects related to contemporary Eastern Europe and Eurasia. I have translated novels, short stories and poems and I translated and edited Subkultura, a book on Russian subcultures. I was an editor of The Calvert Journal, an online magazine about East European culture, and was previously a trustee of the Calvert 22 Foundation. Articles I have written have appeared in The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and on the NYU All the Russias blog.
Research interests
At the core of my research is an interest in Russophone modernist literature and especially Futurism in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. My first book, The Unlikely Futurist (2020) investigated the question of originality in avant-garde poetry written in Russian between 1910 and 1930 — how can writers ever hope to create something genuinely new? — and how this affects the way they think about history, identity and society.
In that same late-imperial / early-Soviet context, I've also written on topics such as lifewriting, nonsense and the interface of literature and architecture. More recently, I have examined the influence of Russian modernism, via translation into Scots, on Scottish literature.
I've always combined this fascination with 20th-century creativity with an interest in the present. Previously, this has meant things like exploring Russophone digital cultures and literary translation, but Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has reoriented my priorities. I am currently coming to the end of two projects devised in response to the war:
- Власними словами | In Our Own Words - a series of creative workshops for Ukrainian refugees in Glasgow, funded by an AHRC Impact Accelerator Award, using my research on multilingual translation as a catalyst for integration.
- From the Ground Up: Reframing Russian Studies in Scotland and Beyond - a series of workshops, funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, in which researchers in the humanities and social science will develop new approaches to the study of Russia and Russian in the academy and elsewhere.
I remain, however, committed to the value of innovative, non-instrumental research on Russophone culture. As such, I am actively exploring major research projects around intertextuality in Russian poetry and around the interconnections between dress, identity and culture in the early Soviet Union.
Supervision
I am currently supervising Liudmila Tomanek in her PhD project on the translation of Svetlana Alexievich's polyphonic prose, and Sophia Robertson for her PhD project analysing the speeches of Vladimir Putin.
I would welcome the chance to work with other post-graduate resarchers working in many different areas. In particular, I'd be eager to collaborate on projects related to:
- Early Soviet literature and culture
- Russophone literature, especially poetry
- Clothes and culture in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union
- Literary translation from/into Russian.
- Tomanek, Liudmila
Preserving Polyphony in Translation.
I have co-supervised postgraduate projects about memory in contemporary Russian media, French and Soviet avant-garde writing, and on translation.
I previously supervised a PhD project comparing Osip Mandelshtam and Hugh MacDiarmid.
Teaching
I teach on a wide number of courses in Russian culture and language, including:
- Russian language for beginners
- Russian Culture 2
- Translation from Russian
- MSc in Translation Studies
- Brave New Worlds: Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution
Elsewhere in my teaching I cover topics such as fairy tales, Soviet cinema, and concepts of space in global modernism.
Additional information
I am the co-convenor of Histories and Subjectivities research clusters at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures and of the Modernism, Avant-Garde and Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture cluster in the College of Arts.
I am a member of the Advisory Board for the Edwin Morgan Trust.
