Isobel Palmer

I joined the Modern Languages Department at Birmingham in September 2018. I completed my MA and PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, where I taught Russian and Czech language, Russian literature, and college composition, and held a fellowship in Global Urban Humanities. I hold a BA in Russian and German from the University of Cambridge.

My research draws on theories and methods from literary theory, media theory, sound and performance studies, and urban theory to investigate the relationship between art and society in twentieth- and twenty first-century Russia and the Soviet Union.

My current book project, Vital Signs: Rhythm, Image and Voice in Russian Modernist Poetry and Theory 1905-1922, addresses the continued currency in Russia of traditional poetic forms alongside radical modernist experimentation during the turbulent period surrounding modernization, urbanization, and the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. It argues that modernist poets and formalist theorists regarded the formal devices of poetry as a kind of technology and as the means by which poetry could actively intervene in the social, political, and historical circumstances of their time.

My new project concerns public poetry performance and issues surrounding public space and the public sphere in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. This project examines poetry’s capacity to create communities, and offers a timely perspective on debates surrounding the role of poetry and literature more generally as a space for social engagement, intervention, and change.