Dr Birgit Beumers

Reader

(BA 1986, DPhil 1991) was born and raised in Aachen (Germany) and came to England in 1982 to study English and French Literature at Oxford Brookes. She also studied Russian at the universities of Geneva and Paris. After graduation she spent a year in Moscow before she went on to St Antony’s College, Oxford University, where she completed a D.Phil on Yuri Lyubimov and the Taganka Theatre. During her postgraduate research she spent much time in Russia and worked with Anatoli Vasiliev at the School of Dramatic Art in Moscow.

From 1992-94 she held a temporary appointment in the Slavonic Department at the University of Cambridge. In 1994 she joined the Bristol Russian Department.

Dr Beumers specialises in contemporary Russian culture. Her research interests generally lie in contemporary culture, especially theatre and drama, and Russian and Central Asian cinema. She has written a monograph on Yuri Lyubimov at the Taganka Theatre and has co-authored a book on New Drama in Russia with Mark Lipovetsky. She has written on Russian cinema: her book on the filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov was published in 2005, following her film companion on Burnt by the Sun; and on Russian popular culture Pop Culture Russia! (2005). She is the author of A History of Russian Cinema (2009) and has edited Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in Post-Soviet Cinema (1999) and 24 Frames: The Cinema of Russia and the former Soviet Union (2007), as well as a two volumes on the post-Soviet Russian media (with Stephen Hutchings and Natalya Rulyova). During 2007-2009 she held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to explore Russian animation.

She teaches a variety of units on twentieth-century Russian culture, including film and theatre, cultural politics and popular culture. She contributes to Russian language teaching at all levels.

With the art historian Mike O'Mahony she founded in 2000 the Centre for Russian and East European Cultural Studies (CREECS), which held conferences and organised seminar series until 2007. She is currently (again) on the committee of the British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) and runs the Association's Study Group for Russian Culture, which organises conferences and symposia. She has served as Slavonic Editor of Modern Language Review from 2001-2006 and is editor of the online journal on contemporary Russian cinema, KinoKultura as well as a print journal devoted to the history of Russian cinema Studies in Russian an Soviet Cinema which appears three times a year.