At present, I am a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant at the University of Central Lancashire. In this post, my duties are to help in publication of monographs and to assist with grant applications. One example of projects that we are trying to develop is to examine the role of Science Fiction filmmaking in Eastern Europe and Russia. Others include investigations of transnational actors and European cinema’s relation to issues of work.
I hold a doctorate from the University of St Andrews. My doctoral thesis involved a transnational approach to postcommunist Russian cinema examining the portrayals of Russians abroad in fiction films. A monograph based on the thesis is contracted with Berghahn Books. I have published a handful articles related to Russian cinema and I am a regular reviewer of films on KinoKultura. Alongside my expertise in postcommunist filmmaking, I have conducted research on topics that include Inuit filmmaking, bicycle cinema, and, more recently, the cinema of BRIC countries.
It is this variety of research that also informs my professional academic life. I have been an editorial assistant on the St Andrews Film Studies’ book, Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe (Brown, Iordanova and Torchin, 2010). Furthermore, I have organised a workshop series at the Tirana International Film Festival 2009, which dealt with Balkan cinema through a cross-cultural perspective, and a postgraduate conference entitled Postcommunist Visual Culture and Cinema, from which I am now running a network of young scholars.
Based on these two latter events, I am currently collecting a manuscript for publication entitled Postcommunist Film: Industry, Text and World Culture, which is contracted with Routledge. In addition to this, I am also in the process of co-editing a collection with Ewa Mazierska and Eva Näripea, entitled Screening Neighbours: Eastern European Cinema and Postcolonial Theory, which looks at the shift in representing neighbours in communist and postcommunist cinema. An offer of publication has been extended by IB Tauris.