Philip Ross Bullock

Professor Philip Ross Bullock, MSt, DPhil (BA Durham), studied at the universities of Durham and Oxford, and has worked at the University of Wales, Bangor, and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College, London. He held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford, and was Edward T. Cone Member in Music Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton in 2007. He returned to Wadham College – where he completed his DPhil and was also organ scholar – in 2007. His article on Tchaikovsky’s songs (‘Eloquent Speech and Articulate Silence: The Queerness of Tchaikovsky’s Songs’) received the 2009 Philip Brett Award of the American Musicological Society, and in 2009, he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for Modern Languages.

He is currently working on the relationship between words and music in Russian culture from the late eighteenth century to the present day. His specific focus is on the literary, musical and cultural history of art-song in Russia, but he has published on Soviet opera too. He continues to be interested in the prose writers of the early-Soviet period, particularly Andrei Platonov and Isaak Babel. His main areas of methodological expertise include theories of gender and sexuality, interdisciplinary approaches to the relationship between literature and the other arts, and the study of translation, reception and cultural exchange. He particularly enjoys communicating academic ideas to a broader public, and has written and presented a number of talks and features on Russian literature and music that have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3. In 2023-24, he and Iain Burnside are co-cocurating a series of recitals at Wigmore Hall devoted to Rachmaninov and his contemporaries, and in 2022, Philip was scholar-in-residence at the Bard Music Festival, devoted to 'Rachmaninov and His World'.

Updated: 1/10/2023