ProfessorHenrietta Mondry

My main field of research is literary studies, with the focus on literature and cultural history and society from nineteenth century to the present. I have published on Russian/Soviet, European and South African literature as well as on Russophone emigre writing. 

 I have written on the literary canon (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev), on "forgotten" classics, such as Gleb Uspensky, and pioneered work on formerly forbidden writers and thinkers (Konstantin Leontiev and Vasily Rozanov).  I am particularly interested in cultural and scientific underpinnings of discourses of alterity in ethnicity, gender and species.  My approch is cross-cultural and interdisciplinary.

I have authored twelve academic books, including Embodied Differences (2021), Dostoevsky i evrei (2021), Political Animals (2015), Vasily Rozanov and the Body of Russian Literature (2010), Exemplary Bodies (2010),  Pure, Strong and Sexless: Gleb Uspensky and the Peasant Woman's Body (2005), Pisateli-narodniki i evrei (2005) among others, all of which have been reviewed in leading academic journals internationally in a number of languages.

I received a number of international reseach fellowships, including Distinguished Fellowship and Senior Research Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Durham University, Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Stellenbosch, Skirball Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Fellowship at the Bundesinstitut for East European Studies in Colognue, Research Fellowship awarded by the Joint Committee on Soviet Studies by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research  Council.

I gave guest lectures and research seminars in a number of universities worldwide, including UK, US, Germany, Belgium, Finland, Russia, South Africa, China, Japan.

I am  Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand since 2009.