The door was held open for me.
Now I hold it open for others.

I'm the first in my family to go to university, let alone stay on for a PhD. My own studies were only made possible by funding, a Hardship Fund at St Andrews that covered my semester abroad in St Petersburg and supported my final year of undergraduate study, and an AHRC Open Competition Doctoral Scholarship, through the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH), that funded two years of my PhD. At the points that mattered most, scholarships made my studies possible.

That's part of why the final stretch of a PhD, the bit nobody funds, stuck with me. By the time I reached my viva, I was working almost entirely on my own steam, even though my own supervisors were generous with their time throughout. Final-year supervision capacity is stretched thin at almost every UK university, a structural gap in the system, not a reflection on the people doing the supervising. I got through it. But I remember exactly how alone I felt in that last push, and how much easier it would have been with someone whose sole focus was walking me through it.

I built the service I wish had existed for me, not a replacement for a supervisor, but the specific, structured support that's hardest to get exactly when you need it most.

My doctoral research, on the role of translators in staging Mikhail Bulgakov's work in Britain and America, took me into archives most researchers never get to see: rare Russian-language manuscripts at Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Glenny Collection at UCL, the National Theatre Archive. It saw me recognised as First Laureate in the CIUTI 2025 PhD Award, and led to invitations to speak at Yale and at the CIUTI Annual Conference in Milan.

Since finishing my own PhD, I've watched friends and colleagues go through the same stretched-supervision experience I did, talented researchers who are entirely capable of a strong thesis and a confident viva, but given almost no structured space to prepare for either. When my fellowship at Durham ended in 2026, I made Academia, Translated my full-time focus. It's now the work I do every day: clear feedback, honest rehearsal, and, through the scholarship programme, a funded place for scholars facing the same barriers I did.

There's one more thread in this story. During my undergraduate studies, I used to meet with Andrii, a Russophone Ukrainian friend of my mum's, in my hometown, to practise my Russian. Andrii was from Dnipro and had been through a lot. All he ever asked in return was that I pay it forward, that I use what I was learning to help others.

Academia, Translated is part of the promise I made to Andrii many years ago. Now it's my turn to help other scholars.