PRESENTATION
I am a second-year PhD student, specializing in British, Russian, and Near Eastern cultural histories and geographies. More specifically, I am working on travel writings produced during the long nineteenth century by British travelers in the southern frontiers of the Russian Empire, namely the Crimea and the Caucasus. The expanded timeframe (1783–1914) and the large corpus (over 240 texts identified) will allow me to determine how British men and women traveled with imperial preconceptions in lands that were under non-British imperial control. It is supposed that in their written and visual representations of “exotic” “Others” and “strange” landscapes, these travelers had to adopt a new, non-imperial yet perhaps dominating gaze while also striving to adapt these peoples and scenery into familiar frames. The ethnographic and historical qualities of these documents will also be assessed; observations that reflect the national (British) identity just as much as plurality of the Russian, Crimean, or Caucasian ones.
I am working under the supervision of Mrs. Hélène Ibata (Professor of British civilization, Université de Strasbourg, UR 2325 Savoirs dans l’Espace Anglophone : Représentations, Culture, Histoire – SEARCH) and the co-supervision of Mr. Rodolphe Baudin (Professor of Russian literature, Sorbonne Université, UMR 8224 Europe orientale, balkanique et médiane – EUR’ORBEM, dont le Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherches sur l’Europe orientale, l’Asie centrale et la Russie – CIRRUS).
My PhD thesis/dissertation is entitled “Nineteenth-Century British Travel Writing About the Crimea and the Caucasus Under Russian Imperial Domination: From the Northern Tour to the Southern Frontiers.” In French: “Les récits de voyage britanniques du dix-neuvième siècle sur la Crimée et le Caucase sous la domination impériale russe : du Tour du Nord aux frontières du Sud.”
I occasionally work on twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular culture and music as well as international politics, with a specific emphasis on the case of the Eurovision Song Contest.