Professor David Shepherd

MA (Oxford), PhD (Manchester), Professor of Russian

Contact details

Telephone: +44 (0)114 222 9898

email : d.g.shepherd@sheffield.ac.uk

Biography

After almost 11 years as a Lecturer in the Department of Russian Studies at the University of Manchester, I was appointed to a chair of Russian at Sheffield in 1994. I established the Bakhtin Centre in October of that year, and was its Director until September 2008; I am now Associate Director. From 1996 to 2001, I was Head of Department, and from 1999 to 2001 Chair of the School of Modern Languages and Linguistics. I am currently and Director of the Humanities Research Institute (HRI); as Director of the HRI I am a member of the Executive Board of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. I am also a Senate representative on University Council.

From 2004 to 2007 I was President of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES), and will be Vice-President (Past President) until 2010.

I was a member of sub-panel 51 (Russian, Slavonic and East European Languages) for RAE 2008, and until 2012 will be a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Peer Review College.

At the end of March 2009 I will be leaving the University of Sheffield to become Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at Keele University.

Research interests

My principal research achievements lie in three areas:

• Twentieth-century Russian culture. I am the author of the first sustained account of metafiction in Russian literature (1992), and in 1998 co-edited, with Catriona Kelly, two volumes that helped pioneer new, multidisciplinary approaches to the analysis of Russian culture.
• Critical and cultural theory, with particular reference to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and the Bakhtin Circle. In 1994 I established the Bakhtin Centre, which under my directorship has played a leading role in shifting the agenda of Bakhtin studies away from application of Bakhtinian theory towards historically sensitive contextualisation of the Bakhtin Circle's work (see especially the 2004 book The Bakhtin Circle: In the Master's Absence).
• Digital humanities, with particular reference to the developing role of e-Science in arts and humanities research: as an early adopter of e-Science methodologies I have led an exploration, in an AHRC-funded workshop series, of the uses of Access Grid for collaborative arts and humanities research.

Recent publications

• ‘A feeling for history? Bakhtin and “the problem of great time”’, Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 84, no. 1 (2006), pp. 32–51.
  
  
• ‘“Not created by Flaubert”: Bakhtin and the temptation of cultural history’, in Lazar Fleishman, Gabriella Safran and Michael Wachtel (eds), Word, Music, History: A Festschrift for Caryl Emerson (Stanford Slavic Studies, vols. 29–30), Part I (vol. 29) (Stanford, 2005), pp. 32–51.
  
  
• ‘La Pensée de Bakhtine: dialogisme, décalage, discordance’ [Bakhtin’s Thought: Dialogism, Disjuncture, Discordance], in Karine Zbinden and Irène Weber Henking (eds), La Quadrature du Cercle Bakhtine: traductions, influences et remises en contexte (CTL, no. 45 [série ‘Théorie’]; Lausanne: Centre de Traduction Littéraire de Lausanne, 2005), pp. 5–25.
  
  
• The Bakhtin Circle: In the Master’s Absence, ed. Craig Brandist, David Shepherd and Galin Tihanov (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).
  
  
• ‘Imia or prozvishche? Bakhtin, Gogol and the history of laughter’, in Joe Andrew and Robert Reid (eds), Gogol 2002. Volume I: Gogol and Others (Essays in Poetics, no. 28) (Keele: Essays in Poetics Publications, 2003), pp. 181–201.
  
  
• ‘Bakhtin and the methodologies of the human sciences: the problem of the text’, in Bogusław Żyłko (ed.), Bakhtin and His Intellectual Ambience (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2002), pp. 21–33.

Download a list of David's publications and conference/seminar papers (PDF, 110KB)

Recent lectures and presentations

• ‘The potential of Access Grid for collaborative research in the arts and humanities’, session on Methods and Technologies for Enabling Virtual Research Communities, E-Science Institute, University of Edinburgh. Webcast
  
  
• ‘Bakhtin and the humanities—past, present and future’, Leslie Brooks Lecture, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Durham, May 2007
  
  
• ‘Evidence of value of ICT resources for arts and humanities’, at AHRC ICT Methods Network Expert Seminar on Evidence of Value: ICT in the Arts and Humanities, CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities), University of Cambridge, January 2007
  
  
• ‘Sustainability of digital resources: a centre perspective’, at AHRC ICT Methods Network Expert Seminar on Sustainability of Digital Resources in the Arts and Humanities, King’s College London, November 2006
  
  
• ‘Philology, intellectual history, and theory: can they co-exist?’, at 37th National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Salt Lake City, Utah, November 2005
  
  
• ‘Does “application” have a future in Bakhtin studies?’, at Twelfth International Bakhtin Conference, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, July 2005 (roundtable on ‘The Future of Bakhtin Studies’)

Research students currently supervised

• Hilary Bagshaw
• Daniel Bird
• Ruth Derksen
• David Hamilton
• Ana Maria Oliva
• Dusan Radunovic
• Karolina Ziolo