Dr Natasha GRIGORIAN
Director of Studies in Russian and Ukranian 2009-10
Fellow of Fitzwilliam College
Email: ng321 "at" cam.ac.uk
Website: http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/slavonic/staff/ng321/
Natasha Grigorian mainly works on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European literature (especially poetry) and visual art. Before coming to Cambridge, she studied at Oxford, also undertaking academic exchange visits to the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) and Moscow State Lomonosov University. Her comparative research relates Russia at the turn of the century to France and Germany of the same period, with a special emphasis on French Symbolist influence across Europe. Within this area, she specialises in intercultural transaction; the relationship between word and image; literary and artistic uses of myth; poetic evocations of women; and issues of aesthetics. She is the author of a recent monograph, European Symbolism: In Search of Myth (1860-1910), published with Peter Lang International Publishers in 2009 as Volume 14 in the prestigious series Romanticism and after in France. Featuring 27 colour illustrations from leading museums worldwide, this book is the first comparative study of the Symbolist use of myth in France, Germany, and Russia, with special reference to the French painter Gustave Moreau and his inspirational role for poets in Western Europe and Russia alike. Natasha Grigorian's articles on Moreau, Redon, Huysmans, Heredia, Moréas, Bryusov, and George have appeared in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Comparative Critical Studies, and The German Quarterly. Her current research project moves on to examine representations of femininity in Symbolism and its legacy, with particular attention to Alexandr Blok, among others.