Josephine von Zitzewitz has held research and teaching posts at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Bristol. She is about to finish a monograph, entitled The Culture of Samizdat: Literature and Underground Networks in the Late Soviet Union, and preparing for her new project on contemporary Russian poetry on the internet and the importance of translation. In her free time she translates from Russian, mostly poetry. Her translations have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Dream Catcher, Notre Dame Review and the award-winning anthology 100 Poems about Moscow. Her teaching interests include Russian literature and culture of the 19th and 20th century and translation into English. Her research interests include: Late Soviet literature, in particular the 1970s and ‘underground’ literature; Russian poetry in all its forms; religious thought, in particular its bearing on literature; the literature and material memory of the Gulag.
Masha Karp is a London-based freelance journalist with a special interest in relations between Russia and the West. She is the author of a recently published Russian biography of George Orwell and editor of the Orwell Society Journal. Her articles have been published by The Independent, Standpoint, The Spectator, Open Democracy, The Common Review, and in Russian by Inostrannaya Literatura. Masha was Russian Features editor (1997-2009) and previously a producer (1991-1997) with the BBC Russian Service. Her programmes on cultural, political and social issues are available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/russian/indepth/radio_archives.shtml. She also produced, presented and participated in BBC Radio 4 and World Service radio programmes in English (including Crossing Continents, Word of Mouth, New Europe, Assignment, Pick of the World and Outlook) and in the live BBC World Television show Europe Direct. Masha is a translator of English and German poetry and prose into Russian and has published translations of many writers, including Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Jennings, Alice Munro, Andreas Griffius and Nicolaus Lenau, as well as articles on translation. She is a member of the St. Petersburg Writers’ Union and the Literary Translators Guild in Russia and a member of the UK Chartered Institute of Linguists. She is chair of the Pushkin Club in Britain.
Simon Cosgrove, who lives in Somerset in the United Kingdom, is currently chair of trustees. He led the work of Rights in Russia as director for eight years from its founding on 19 January 2010 until January 2018. Simon has many years’ experience working on grantmaking programmes supporting human rights organizations in Russia – first with the European Commission and then with the US-based MacArthur Foundation. He has a PhD in Russian history from UCL and has also worked as a researcher for Amnesty International. Earlier in his career he trained as a high school teacher, working in schools in London and rural Zimbabwe. He continues to work in schools in Somerset. He is the author of Russian Nationalism and the Politics of Soviet Literature: the Case of Nash Sovremennik 1981-91 (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke & New York, 2004) and a number of articles and book reviews.