Associate Professor Robert Lagerberg is a leading scholar in Russian Studies at the University of Melbourne, serving as Senior Lecturer and Convenor of Russian Studies in the School of Languages and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts. He earned his PhD in Slavic Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, submitting his dissertation in December 2002 under the committee chaired by Professors Alan Timberlake, Viktor Zhivov, Johanna Nichols, and John Lindow. Throughout his career at the University of Melbourne, Lagerberg has progressed from Lecturer in Russian to his current associate professorship, contributing extensively to teaching and program coordination in Russian language and culture. He holds the position of Editor for the Australian Slavonic and East European Studies (ASEES) journal, where he oversees publications on Slavic and East European topics, and has co-edited volumes of the journal.

Lagerberg's research centers on the phonology of the Russian language, with particular expertise in stress variation, accent, emphasis, suffixation, and morphological processes. His seminal works include the monograph Accent and Emphasis in Russian: 2nd improved and extended Edition (Routledge, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 2014) and Stress and suffixation in modern Russian: The development of uniform syllable stress (Astra Publishing, 1999). Key articles encompass "Variation and frequency in Russian word stress" (Australian Slavonic and East European Studies, 2008), "Towards a comprehensive account of the stress of Russian verbs containing the suffix-ировать: a survey of Russian speakers" (Russian Linguistics, 2005), "The stress of Russian adjectives containing the suffix-чатый" (Russian Linguistics, 2006), "Towards a linguistic typology of address pronouns in Europe–past and present" (Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, 2013), and "Stress Variation and Frequency in Russian Nouns of the ᴤубά (f) Pattern" (Australian Slavonic & East European Studies, 2010). Lagerberg has also examined pragmatic factors in stress, address forms in language contact across Slavic languages, and representational aspects of domestic space and liminality in Russian cinema, as seen in "From post-soviet to post-national: domestic space as non-place in Andrei Zviagintsev’s Elena and Leviathan" (International Journal of Russian Studies, 2018), "Home, sweet home: The significance of the apartment in the film Malen'kaia Vera/Little Vera" (Studies in European Cinema, 2011), and "Dislocation and Liminality in Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan and Loveless" (New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 2021). His contributions extend to pedagogical tools like "Skryba: An online orthography teaching tool for learners from bilingual backgrounds" (Computer Assisted Language Learning, 2004). Published in outlets such as Russian Linguistics, Scando-Slavica, and Quaestio Rossica, Lagerberg's scholarship advances understanding of Russian phonological systems and their evolution.

Professional Email: robertjl@unimelb.edu.au