Valeria Vladimirovna Smolenenkova, PhD in philology, associate professor at the Department of General and Comparative Linguistics of the Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia. Smolenenkova is a practising speechwriter and the author of the first Russian textbook on rhetorical criticism. She published a number of articles on rhetoric, rhetorical criticism and communication about Dostoevsky’s and Stalin’s speeches. She is a member of the Rhetoric Society of Europe. Her main research interests include rhetoric, argumentation, rhetorical criticism, rhetorical analysis of public speeches, and theory of communication.

She graduated from the Faculty of Philology of the Lomonosov Moscow State University in 2000, qualified as ‘Philologist. Teacher of the Russian Language and Literature with specialization in Philology’. In 2005, defended a PhD thesis entitled ‘Rhetorical Criticism as a Philological Method for Public Speaking’. During her postgraduate studies, she completed study programmes at universities of the USA, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Since 2005, she has been teaching at the Department of General and Comparative Linguistics of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. Valeria Smolenenkova also teaches courses on rhetoric and speech culture at the Faculty of Public Administration of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. She has been invited as lecturer and consultant to universities and public institutions in Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and China.

E-mail: vsmolenenkova@hotmail.com