Irina Savkina

Savkina Irina Leonardovna is a Candidate of Philological Sciences, Associate Professor, Doctor of Philosophy, and lecturer in the Department of Russian Language and Culture at the University of Tampere, Finland.

She was born in the Urals into a family of mining engineers. In 1975, she graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Leningrad State University. From 1975 to 1981, she worked as a lecturer in the Department of Literature at the Vologda State Pedagogical Institute, while simultaneously working on her Candidate dissertation, “Soviet Memoir-Biographical Prose of the 1970s” (Artistic Distinctiveness. Traditions. Development Trends), under the supervision of Professor V. V. Gura. She defended her dissertation at the Herzen Leningrad State Pedagogical Institute in 1982.

From 1981 to 1993, she worked in the Department of Literature at KSPI as an assistant and senior lecturer, and since 1989 as an associate professor. In 1991, she was awarded the academic title of Associate Professor in the Department of Literature.

During her work at KSPI, she taught the courses “History of 18th-Century Russian Literature,” “History of the First Half of the 19th-Century Russian Literature,” “History of Literary Criticism,” and “History of Karelian Literature.”

Since August 1993, she has worked as a lecturer in the Department of Slavic Philology at the University of Tampere, Finland. In 2001, she defended her doctoral dissertation, “I Write Myself: Autodocumentary Women’s Texts in Russian Literature of the First Half of the 19th Century.” She is currently a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Tampere and a member of the editorial board of the Helsinki-based journal LiteraruS — “Literary Word.”

She has more than 90 publications in Russia and abroad (Finland, Germany, Poland) in collective volumes, mainly on the issues of Russian women’s prose and women’s poetry.