Emma Jane Baxter

My doctoral project considers the dialogic connections between mathematics and early twentieth-century Russophone literature, focussing on writers, artists, and mathematicians from Russia and Ukraine. My research will work with prose, poetry, literary manifestos, and (popular) science writing from 1900-1930, contextualised within late Imperial Russian and early Soviet pedagogical attitudes towards interdisciplinary education. I seek to understand how and why writers engaged with contemporaneous mathematical ideas, and incorporated mathematics into their creative practice. Simultaneously, I want to know how Russian, Ukrainian, and Soviet mathematicians were influenced by artistic ideas and cultural movements in their approach to mathematics and in their (non-)scientific writings. My research is co-supervised by Professor Philip Bullock and Dr Christopher Hollings, and funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP, Wadham's Mr Michell Scholarship, and the Clarendon fund.

I graduated from the University of St Andrews in 2023 with an MA (Hons) in Mathematics and Russian, and an MSt in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford in 2024.