Rowan Dowling

Salvesen Junior Research Fellow in Russian

Teaching:
In the 2025-6 academic year I am delivering multiple lecture series for the Slavonic sub-faculty on Russian LGBTQ+ literature and culture, forms of documentary writing, and women’s writing. Previously, as a stipendiary lecturer at Wadham College in 2024 and New College in 2025, I taught a range of undergraduate and postgraduate classes: Paper VIII (Russian literature from 1820 to the present), Paper II (translation from Russian into English), and Paper XII (Gender and Representation in Russian Culture from 1800), for which students opted to write on topics as diverse as contemporary feminist performance art, queerness in Slavic folklore, and non-binary gender identity in music videos.

Research:
My research interests lie in Russian literature, LGBTQ+ lives and representation, gender and sexuality studies, speculative fiction, and game studies.
My current work as a Junior Research Fellow at Univ analyses queer world-building in Russian sci-fi and fantasy. How are LGBTQ+ societies envisioned in utopian speculative fiction authored by queer and feminist writers on the one hand, and in anti-utopias written by homophobic authors on the other? Which elements of queer life—or stereotypes of queerness—are woven into the fabric of these worlds? How do these visions of the future reflect contemporary geopolitics and legislation?

This project builds on my DPhil research, which charted three decades of bisexual sources and voices from Russia (1993-2023). The thesis provided a holistic view of how bisexual themes, people, and characters have been (self-)represented across different media in the period, and was supported by AHRC, the Clarendon Fund, and Wadham College.

Publications:
Rowan Dowling, ‘Russian Trans* Stories: Collective Transgender Autobiography as Activism’, Avtobiografija 11 (2022): 161–86.
Rowan Dowling (published C. Dowling), ‘Across the Divide: Feats of Friendship and Romance in the Gulag’. FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & The Arts, no. 28 (June 2019).