David Shepherd is Professor of Cultural Theory, and Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, at Keele University, UK. He has published extensively on Russian cultural and cultural theory. He is the author of Beyond Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in Soviet Literature (1992), and editor of several volumes about Mixail Baxtin, notably Bakhtin and Cultural Theory (with Ken Hirschkop, 1989 and 2001) and The Bakhtin Circle: In the Master's Absence (with Craig Brandist and Galin Tihanov, 2004).Contact: mailto:d.g.shepherd@keele.ac.uk