Research projects

Ingunn Lunde trained as a medieval scholar of East-Slavic text culture. More recently, she has been working on language policy and language ideologies in Russia, politics of history and memory, focusing in particular at how contemporary prose literature has responded to these issues, i.e. to the language question, on the one hand, and to a range of issues linked to history/the past, on the other. Since 2022 she has also worked on contemporary Ukrainian literature and languages policies in Ukraine. Her first monograph was on Kiril of Turaû’s (12th c) homiletic rhetoric and its Byzantine sources (Harrassowitz 2001). Recent books include Language on Display: Writers, Fiction and Linguistic Culture in Post-Soviet Russia (Edinburgh UP 2018, pbk 2018) and Fragmenter av fortid: Historiens rolle i russisk samtidslitteratur (Dreyers forlag 2018). She is currently writing a (the first) history of Russian literature in Norwegian. 

Johanne Kalsaas studies narratives about Norway on the Russian-language Internet, aiming to uncover the dynamics of pro-Kremlin propaganda in participatory media environments. Kalsaas’ project takes three contentious events in the Russo-Norwegian relationship as a point of departure for discourse-centered fieldwork in Russia’s social mediascape:The espionage case against Frode Berg, the commemoration of the Red Army’s liberation of Northern Norway during WWII, and the 2020-cyberattack on the Norwegian parliament attributed to Russia (work in progress). Kalsaas’ background is in Russian media and communication studies, where she has previously worked on Russian mainstream media discourse on the issue of refugees, and communication strategies in Russian refugee activism.

Stehn A. Mortensen has previously published on Bulgakov’s short fiction applying theories of posthumanism, as well as on Russia’s pronatalist censorship laws and the contemporary writer Sorokin. Mortensen is currently working on finishing his dissertation, Vladimir Sorokin’s Splintering Poetics.

Kåre Johan Mjør’s current research interests are Russian philosophy and intellectual history from the nineteenth century to the present, contemporary ideologies in Russia, Russian imperial history and literature. He has published four books, edited two volumes/special issues and about thirty academic articles/book chapters.

Irina Anisimova [coming soon]

Martin Paulsen wrote his PhD thesis on Russian language ideology, with a focus on developments after the fall of the Soviet Union. He works on Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian language and literature. At the moment he serves as Head of Department at the Department of Foreign Languages and works on a book project on Ukrainian history.

Kyle Marquardt is currently involved in multiple projects related to identity and public opinion in the former Soviet Union. In ongoing research with colleagues, he uses a variety of observational and experimental techniques to probe the sources of support for Russian President Vladimir Putin. In other research, he uses census and survey data to track linguistic change in the former Soviet Union; he also uses survey data to analyze the relationship between identity and support for regional sovereignty in both Russia and Moldova. He is also a Project Manager for Measurement and Methods for the Varieties of Democracy Project, and in this capacity he conducts work on the advantages and disadvantages of using experts to code political phenomena.

Susanne Bygnes currently works on a project entitled “Russian Migrants and the anti-war movement (RAW)”. This pilot project funded by the University of Bergen was initiated in September 2022. It explores the experiences and activities of Russian migrants in Europe who have mobilized for peace after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Based on observations and in-depth interviews, the project studies the Russian anti-war movement abroad focusing initially on one central (Berlin) and two more peripherical (Barcelona and Oslo) sites. In Germany, mobilization for democracy in Russia has diversified and/or intensified in the wake of the invasion, while in Spain and Norway the full-scale invasion has strengthened the emergence of Russian migrants mobilizing for a democratic development. The project also takes into account that the Russian anti-war movement abroad is highly transnational, spanning local initiatives and individuals across many locations, including initiatives inside Russia. In a migrant population known for not being easily mobilized for political purposes, what motivates and what restricts Russians who live in Europe to mobilize against the war and for a democratic development in Russia? Does the political mobilization of Russian migrants against war that started in 2022 have bearings on the potential for building a stronger pro-democratic community of Russian migrants in Europe? These are the central research questions to be addressed by this project.

Dinara Yangeldina [coming soon]

Elina Troscenko [coming soon]