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Ruth Coates

University of Bristol

Ruth Coates is Associate Professor of Russian Religious Thought in the Department of Russian Studies at the University of Bristol, UK.

She specialises in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russian intellectual history. Her research interests are in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian religious thought, Russian Orthodox theology and culture and its influence on secular Russian thought, and the work of the twentieth-century philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. 

She is the author of Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author (CUP, 1998) and co-editor of The Emancipation of Russian Christianity (Edwin Mellen, 1995) and Landmarks Revisited: The Vekhi Symposium 100 Years On (Academic Studies Press, 2013).

Her most recent book, Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905-1917 (OUP, 2019) is a study of the reception of the Greek patristic doctrine of deification in late imperial Russian religious thought, with a focus on works by D. Merezhkovskii, N. Berdiaev, S. Bulgakov, and P. Florensky.

She is currently developing a project on the twentieth-century reception of (Russian) Orthodox spirituality in the UK, with a focus on women writers.

Russia’s Two Enlightenments: The Philokalia and the Accommodation of Reason in Ivan Kireevskii and Pavel Florenskii