Dr Olga Smolyak

Dr Olga Smolyak is a Research Assistant on Russia18, a digital platform under construction designed to conduct research on a collection of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian sources. Her research spans European intellectual history and Russian material culture.

In her first PhD (completed in Russia), she examined the philosophical concept of the ‘other,’ tracing its role in shaping ideas of identity and communication from Cartesian rationalism and Kantian moral philosophy to twentieth-century phenomenology (Husserl and Sartre) and Stegmaier’s Philosophy of Orientation. She recently completed a DPhil at the University of Oxford, where her work explored discourses of Soviet domestic space, engaging with psychological theories of personality alongside sociological debates on family policy and the ‘second shift.’

Olga has also contributed her expertise in intellectual history and discourse analysis to digital humanities projects. She worked on CatCor, a pilot database of Catherine the Great’s correspondence, which received the 2023 Digital Prize from the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Contact Email: Olga.Smolyak@warwick.ac.uk