Professor Muireann Maguire is Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter and Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project “The Dark Side of Translation: 20th and 21st Century Translation from Russian as a Political Phenomenon in the UK, Ireland, and the USA.” She has previously taught Russian literature and language at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and at Queen Mary, University of London. Her academic specializations include the literary Gothic-fantastic, the representation of pregnancy and childbirth in literature, and the nineteenth-century Russian novel. Her book Stalin’s Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature was published by Peter Lang in 2012. She has published several literary translations, including a short story collection Red Spectres: Russian 20th-Century Gothic-Fantastic Tales (2012). A second collection, White Magic, was published in 2021. She is currently working on translating a novel by the poet Georgii Shengeli and several other projects.

Dr Cathy McAteer is Postdoctoral Fellow on the “Dark Side of Translation” project. She holds a PhD (2018) in Russian and Translation Studies from the University of Bristol, a Masters in Translation Studies (2011) and a first-class BA (Hons) in Russian (1996). Her main research interests lie in the field of classic Russian literature in English translation during the twentieth century, using archival material to shed new light on the people and processes behind historical commissions, specifically Penguin’s Russian Classics. Cathy taught Russian-English translation for the MA Translation Studies programme at the University of Bristol between 2013-2019. She has worked as a freelance commercial translator but has also translated the novella Timka’s Tale and a monograph on the Soviet sculptor David Yakerson. Cathy previously worked as an in-house translator in her role as Russia Co-ordinator at Nestle UK Ltd. Her academic monograph, Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian Classics, was published by Routledge Open Access in 2021. You can download Cathy’s book from this link.