Professor Franklin came to Cambridge after an Oxford D.Phil. and a postdoctoral fellowship in Washington, D.C.

Most of his research has been concerned with the history and culture of early Rus and of Russia in the Early Modern period, though he has also published occasional studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature.

In particular, he has focussed on aspects of the cultural significances of the written word across a broad spectrum of genres and forms and technologies: handwritten and printed, graffiti, inscribed objects, ephemera.

Most recently he has been developing a holistic approach to the study of the ‘graphosphere’, the spaces of visible words.

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