About Slavic Studies at Monash University
Slavic Studies engages with research into Russian and other Slavic literatures, post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav studies, Russian and Slavic socio-linguistics and Russian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian topics in Translation Studies.
Admission into Slavic Honours, or Slavic MA by Research, or MA by Course Work and 66% Research or a Slavic PhD requires prior knowledge of a Slavic language or, in the case of specialisation in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory topics, prior study in these areas.
Current and recent research areas in Slavic Studies, which reflect postgraduate research as well as staff research, are the following:
- Poetics of Realism: L N Tolstoy, F M Dostoevsky in the context of Dickens and Flaubert
- Drama: Chekhov and “intimate theatre”, “theatre of cruelty” (Artaud) and “absurd theatre” (Beckett)
- Dialogicity (M Bakhtin, M Mamardashvili)
- Slavic cinema: avant-garde and post-perestroika
- Post-communist popular culture: the Russian detektiv novel, Slovak TV soaps and rock bands
- Russian and Slavic socio-linguistics
Postgraduate Research
Current and recently completed theses in Slavic topics
- Little, great and not-so-great Russian: the minor literature of Nikolai Gogol (PhD)
- The writer's life under Stalinism: Yury Dombrovsky (PhD)
- Representation of Stalinist themes and the recovery of cultural memory in the 'novels of death': The Keeper of Antiquities and The Faculty of Useless Knowledge by Yury Dombrovsky (MA)
- From mass-media to the mafia: a history of the Russian detective novel (PhD)
- The Relationship of Literariness to Utopia in the Russian Literary Canon and Avant-Garde Cinema (PhD CCLCS/Slavic)
- "Polish avant-garde art and the art market in Poland in the Post-Communist Transition." (PhD)
- Puer Senex as Narrative Topos in Andrei Belyi's Kotik Letaev. (MA)
- Bridging The Gap: Examining the response of the international community to complex emergencies: The Experience of Central Bosnia 1992-2001 (MA)
- Reimagining Slovak national identity: media-based popular cultures 1993-2005 (PhD)
- Lyudmila Ulitskaya's prose: the recovery of Russian cultural memory (MA)
- War metaphors in contemporary novels (Slavic/Linguistics PhD)
- Typology of the Narrator in the Serbian Postmodern Novel (PhD)
- The Image in the Poetry of Vasko Popa and Charles Simic (PhD)
- The Oriental Other in Khlebnikov's "Persian Poems" (MA)
- Terms of Politeness in Russian and English (Translation Studies MA)
- Dostoevsky's Short Prose: A Psychoanalytic Approach (MA)
Undergraduate Sequence
Slavic Studies is represented at undergraduate level by a sequence in Ukrainian Studies.
Russian Language is not taught at undergraduate level. Students wishing to study Russian language are advised to seek information from the Russian Program at the University of Melbourne, or the Russian Program at Macquarie University (Sydney) which offers courses i n external mode.