Marco Biasioli

Marco Biasioli is Honorary Fellow at the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at the University of Manchester, where he completed his PhD in Russian Studies in 2020. Since 2018, Marco has been a Teaching Assistant on courses of Linguistics, Translation and History. In 2020, he created and co-organised ‘New Russias’, a festival of contemporary Russian culture in Manchester, aimed at bridging gaps between the UK and Russia in times of political tension. The festival hosted several award-winning Russian musicians, writers, directors and visual artists, and was well received publicly and in the press. His first book, A Small-Scale Russia: ‘Indi’ Identity in Russian Popular Music Culture 2008-2018, is scheduled to be published by Routledge.

Marco’s research interests encompass Soviet and post-Soviet popular music, Russian politics and language-identity relations. In ‘Broadcasting Russia’, he investigates three interrelated topics: 1) the influence of Anglophone cultures on Russian popular musicians, and the values Anglophone Russian performers attach to singing in English; 2) the transnational spread of Russian popular music via new media online platforms and its interpretation, discussion and memeification by international audiences; 3) the reception of Manizha’s performance at Eurovision 2021 in Russian and western media, and its relationship with Russia’s state narratives.