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Dear Alumni, to update information or add your vitae, please write
to the webmaster, Elizabeth
LaVarge-Baptista, or to Graduate Advisers or Department Chair.
Anthony Anemone, Ph.D. 1985
aaanem@wm.edu Dissertation: Konstantin Vaginov and the Leningrad
Avant-Garde: 1921-1934 Academic Positions:
- 1992-present Associate Professor, College of William and Mary
- 1985-1992 Assistant Professor, Colby College
- Spring 1989 Visiting Assistant Professor, Princeton University
- Spring 1985 Acting Instructor, University of California at Berkeley
- 1980-1984 Teaching Assistant & Associate, University of California
at Berkeley
Publications:
- "The Monsters of Peter the Great: The Culture of the St. Petersburg
Kunstkamera in the 18th-Century." Forthcoming in The Slavic
and East European Journal (Winter 2000).
- "Les Monstres de Pierre le Grand: La culture de le Kunstkamera
a Saint Petersbourg au XVIIIe siecle." In Le Mirage Russe au
XVIIIe siecle, eds. Sergei Karp and Larry Wolff (Ferney-Voltaire:
Centre International D'Etude du XVIIIe Siecle, 2001), pp. 37-56.
- "Obsessive Collectors: Collecting Culture in the Novels of Konstantin
Vaginov." The Russian Review, 59 (April 2000), 252-68.
- "Carnival in Theory and Practice: Mikhail Bakhtin and Konstantin
Vaginov." In The Contexts of Bakhtin: Philosophy, Authorship,
Aesthetics, ed. David Shepherd (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic
Publishers, 1998), pp. 57-69.
- "K.K. Vaginov," "Roadside Picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
(encyclopedia entries). In Reference Guide to Russian Literature,
ed. Neil Cornwell (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), pp. 786-87,
861-62.
- "Des muses et des servantes: response a Mark von Hagen." Revue
des Etudes Slaves LXVIII: 2 (1996), 303-6.
- "Nabokov's Despair and the Criminal Imagination." In O Rus!
Studia litteraria slavica in honorem Hugh McLean. ed. Simon
Karlinsky, James Rice & Barry Scherr (Berkeley: Berkeley Slavic
Specialties, 1995), 421-31.
- "Gender, Genre, and the Discourse of Imperialism in Tolstoy's
Cossacks." In The Tolstoy Studies Journal 6 (1993), 47-63.
- with Ivan Martynov, "The Islanders: Poetry and Polemics in Petrograd
of the 1920s." In Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 29 (1992),
107-26.
- "The Anti-World of Daniil Kharms: On the Significance of the
Absurd." In Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd.
Ed. by Neil Cornwell (London: Macmillan, 1991), 71-93.
- with Ivan Martynov. "Nikolaj Chukovskij and Konstantin Vaginov."
(Introduction to publication of "Iz vospominanii" (memoir of K.
Vaginov) by N. Chukovskii. In Wiener Slawistischer Almanach
24 (1989), 91-114.
- "Konstantin Vaginov and the Death of Nikolai Gumilev." In The
Slavic Review 48.4 (1989), 631-36.
- with Ivan Martynov, "A Ring of Poets": Towards the History of
the Leningrad Avant-Garde." In Wiener Slawistischer Almanach
17 (1986), 131-48.
- "Mark Twain's Russian Friend" (Correspondence of Twain and Stepniak-Kravchinskii
in the University of California's Bancroft Library). Bancroftiana,
August 1982, 7-8.
See Tony Anemony's home page at: http://aaanem.people.wm.edu/
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Matthew Baerman, Ph.D. 1999
m.baerman@surrey.ac.uk Dissertation: Free to fixed stress in Slavic
I've been in Europe since 1996 (Poland, Macedonia, Estonia, UK, Belgium). Since
getting my Ph.D. I've been a research fellow in the Surrey Morphology
Group at the University of Surrey (UK), working with Greville Corbett
and Dunstan Brown on a typological study of inflectional syncretism
(see http://www.surrey.ac.uk/LIS/SMG/).
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Polina Barskova, Ph.D. 2006
pbarskova@hampshire.edu
Dissertation: Enchanted by the Spectacle of Death:
Forms of the End in Leningrad Culture (1917-1934)
Assistant Professor of Russian Literatures at Hampshire College,
Massachusetts.
Polina Barskova, assistant professor of Russian literature, recieved
her BA from St. Petersburg State University, and her MA and PhD
from the University of California at Berkeley. Her scholarly publications
include articles on Nabokov, Bakhtin brothers, early Soviet film,
and aestheticization of the historical trauma. She has also authored
six books of poetry in Russian. Professor Barskova is currently
working on a project entitled "Petersburg Beseiged: Culture
of the Aesthetic Opposition."
Please read Polina Barskova's poetry at these and many other sites:
http://www.stephen-spender.org/2011_brodsky_prize/2011_brodsky_second.html
http://www.vavilon.ru/texts/prim/barskova4.html
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Neil Bermel, Ph.D. 1994
n.bermel@sheffield.ac.uk Dissertation: Context and the Lexicon in the Development
of Russian Aspect.
A native of New York, I did my B.A. at Yale University. After finishing my doctorate, I hung around at Berkeley for a year teaching courses part-time, and then was a lecturer in Russian language at UCLA for a year. Since 1996, I’ve been at the Department of Russian & Slavonic Studies at the University of Sheffield, England, where they now call me Reader in Czech Language and Linguistics.
Taking up this post at Sheffield pushed me in the direction of Czech, since my brief was to build a Czech program as an adjunct to Russian (which is our “bread and butter”) on both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Since I got here, we’ve introduced a full range of courses in Czech from first- to fourth-year, developed a student exchange program and research links, expanded our offerings in Slavic linguistics, and have started to see a small but steady trickle of graduate students in Russian and Czech linguistics coming through our department. The students are generally good, interested, and motivated, and make the job worthwhile.
Making the move to the UK was not an easy adjustment, but in many ways it’s been a rewarding one. The geographical proximity to the Czech Republic and our developing links as partner EU countries has also been an unexpected plus.
My research interests have gradually shifted over the years from the meaning of categories and forms to their social significance. After rewriting my dissertation and publishing it, my next project was on the use of non-standard forms in Czech literary dialogue, which resulted in a short monograph. Now I’ve just completed a monograph on spelling reform in Czech, and have headed off in a slightly different direction, working on the reflection of morphological variation in the Czech National Corpus as part of a large team project based in Prague. I’m also collaborating with a colleague on an intermediate-level CD-based language-learning package, to be called Interactive Czech.
A selected publication list and other links are our department web page: www.shef.ac.uk/russian/staff/bermel.html
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Evgenii Bershtein, Ph.D. 1998
zhenya@reed.edu Dissertation: Western Models of Sexuality in Russian
Modernism.
I grew up in Leningrad, USSR. After attending the high-school Number 239 in
Leningrad, I studied Russian literature and linguistics at Tartu
University, Estonia (M.A., 1990), and Slavic Languages and Literatures
at the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D., 1998). In Tartu,
my research focused on the study of the Russian literature of the
eighteenth century (I published essays on Nikolai Karamzin and on
the genre of solemn ode); in Berkeley, my scholarly interests shifted
to Russian Symbolist culture and, thematically, to sexuality as
an aspect of cultural history.
Since 1999, I have been teaching at Reed College in Portland, Oregon
http://academic.reed.edu/russian/
(web.reed.edu), where I am now
Associate Professor of Russian and Chair of the Russian department.
At Reed, I have offered courses on Pushkin, Tolstoy, twentieth-century
Russian literature, Russian and European Symbolism, Soviet and post-Soviet
culture, and on Russian film. I also teach intermediate and advanced
Russian. I have organized a number of conferences at Reed, including
"Music and Terror in Stalinist Russia," "Memory and
the Past in Postsocialist Cultures," and "Understanding
Russian Culture through Film." I have held the Postdoctoral
Research Fellowship at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University
(2001-02) and the Kone Fellowship at the Collegium for Advanced
Studies, Helsinki University, Finland (2004 and 2005).
Since graduating from Berkeley, I have published more than two
dozen essays and book chapters in both English and Russian (the
full-text versions of my several works can be found here: http://academic.reed.edu/russian/bershtein/index.html.)
Currently I am revising a book manuscript entitled "Bereg
zhelaniia": zapadnye kontsepstsii seksual’nosti v russkoi
kul’ture epokhi moderna for the Moscow publishing house
NLO. I am also working on new project exploring Sergei Eisenstein's
erotic theories and their role in his artistic practice.
For more, see http://academic.reed.edu/russian/
(web.reed.edu)
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Avram Brown, Ph.D. 1998
avbrown@email.msn.com
1999-2004 Lecturer at the University of California at Davis. Publications:
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"The Bolshevik Rejection of the ŒRevolutionary Christ' and Dem'ian Bednyi's The Flawless New testament of the Evangelist Dem'ia," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History vol. 2 No 1 (Winter 2001).
-
"Leonid Andreev," in: Dictionary of Literary Biography, volume Russian Writers of the Silver Age (forthcoming).
- Entries on Viktor Pelevin, Boris Yeltsin, Il’ia Kabakov, Grigorii Iavlinskii, Gennadii Ziuganov, Russian space exploration, Buddhism in Russia, and other topics in: Karen Evans-Romaine, Helena Goscilo, and Tatiana Smorodinskaya, eds., The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Russian Culture (to be published by Routledge).
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Molly Brunson, Ph.D. 2009
molly.brunson@yale.edu
Dissertation: The War (and the Peace) between
Russian Literary and Painterly Realism
Assistant Professor of Russian Literature, Yale University
Molly Brunson received her B.A. in Art History from Columbia University
in
2000 and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Slavic Literature from the University
of
California, Berkeley. She is currently completing a manuscript on
the role
of interart competition in the development of distinct traditions
of the
novel and of painting in 19th century Russian Realism. Her second
book will
trace the theory and practice of perspective in Russian painting
and
literature, 1820-1940. She has published on the role of visual culture
in
the prose of Leo Tolstoy and Mikhail Bulgakov. Her broader interests
include the representation of urban and rural space, interart theory,
the
aesthetics and ideology of realism, and the theory of the novel.
For current information, see also http://slavic.yale.edu/brunson
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Roy Chan, Ph.D. 2009 (Comparative Literature)
rchan@wm.edu
Dissertation: The Edge of Knowing: Dreams and
Realism in Modern Chinese Literature
Assistant Professor of Chinese, College of William & Mary
Roy Chan is Assistant Professor of Chinese at the College of William
& Mary. His research focuses on modern Chinese and Russian literatures.
This year he is on leave as a Harvard University Fairbank Center
An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow (2011-2012). He is currently revising
his dissertation, "The Edge of Knowing: Dreams and Realism
in Modern Chinese Literature," a project directly inspired
by Irina Paperno's seminar on Russian realism. He is also beginning
a second book project tentatively titled "A Reflection of Sovereignty:
Revolutionary Utopia and Transnational Desire in Chinese and Russian
Literatures." It will examine modern literary texts in Russia
and China that address the other nation. He argues that the mutual
fascination between Russia and China in the late 19th and 20th century
constituted a mode of reflection on their shared sense of sovereign
crisis in an era of global imperialist contestation. His research
interests include genre, the body, Marxism, ideology, psychoanalysis
and semiotics.
At W&M he has developed an array of new courses, including
a modern Chinese literature survey, an introduction to Chinese cinema,
popular culture, and a freshman seminar on contemporary Chinese
religion. He has also, in his spare time, tutored students in Classical
Chinese. Once in a while he gets the opportunity to flummox his
students by breaking into Russian. He has also discovered that Youtube
viral videos are a great way to get discussion going. Teaching,
mentoring, and even some counseling, no surprise, have constituted
an unmitigated joy of the academic career, and one will always find
a bowl of chocolates and box of tissues in his office.
Roy has of recent become fascinated by postmodernity and late-capitalist
culture, mostly because he discovered that his students do not often
realize the novelty of their 24/7, infinitely self-referential media
culture. He has a seed of an idea to create a new class on 1980s
pop culture and postmodernity, and decided that a great prelude
to the course would be screening Louis Malle’s “My Dinner
with Andre” (1981).
Since leaving Berkeley, Roy has taken up running, completing smaller
races and a few half marathons. Somehow he has gotten over his fear
of conferencing (due to a very negative first experience in graduate
school) and now enjoys the opportunity to travel to different cities,
share ideas, and haggle over the subsequent reimbursements. He suggests
always making a copy of receipts before turning them in.
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William Craft Brumfield, Ph.D. 1973
William Craft Brumfield, recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Fellowship (2000) and Fellow at the National Humanities Center in
1992-93, is Professor of Slavic studies at Tulane University, where
he also lectures at the School of Architecture. In 2002, he was
elected to the State Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction
Sciences. He is an Honorary Member, Russian Academy of the Arts.
In 1973 he earned his Ph.D. fin Slavic Languages (specializing in
19th-century Russian literature and history) at the University of
California, Berkeley. He was assistant professor at Harvard University
(1974-80), and has held visiting appointments at the Universities
of Wisconsin (1973-74) and Virginia (1985-86). In 1997, he received
the annual Faculty Research Award from the Faculty of Liberal Arts
and Sciences at Tulane.
He is the author and photographer of a number of works on Russian
architecture: Gold in Azure: One Thousand Years of Russian Architecture
(Boston: David Godine, Publisher, 1983); The Origins of Modernism
in Russian Architecture (Univ. of California Press, 1991); A History
of Russian Architecture (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), which The
New York Times Book Review included in its "Notable Books of
the Year 1993"; Lost Russia: Photographing the Ruins of Russian
Architecture (Duke Univ. Press, 1995); and Landmarks of Russian
Architecture: A Photographic Survey (Gordon and Breach Publishers,
1997). He edited and contributed chapters to: Reshaping Russian
Architecture: Western Technology, Utopian Dreams (Cambridge Univ.
Press/Woodrow Wilson Center, 1990), Christianity and the Arts in
Russia (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), and Russian Housing in the
Modern Age: Design and Social History (Cambridge Univ. Press/Woodrow
Wilson Center, 1993). In addition, he compiled An Architectural
Survey of St. Petersburg, 1840-1916: Building Inventory (Kennan
Institute, Woodrow Wilson Center, 1994).
He has numerous other publications on Russian architecture, photography,
and literature, and has lectured frequently on these topics at museums
and universities in North America and in Europe. His photographs
of Russian architecture, which have been exhibited at numerous galleries
and museums, are part of the collection of the Photographic Archives
at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
His recent shows include "The Russian Art of Building in Wood"
(a traveling exhibit sponsored by the National Humanities Center),
and "Lost Russia: Photographs by William Brumfield," which
opened at the Duke University Museum of Art in January 1996, and
has since appeared at the New Orleans Museum of Art (Nov. 1996-Feb.
1997), the University of Michigan Museum of Art, and other museums.
He has lived in Russia for a total of four years, and has done graduate
and post-doctoral research at Moscow and Leningrad Universities
(on IREX fellowships), as well as at the Russian Institute of Art
History in Moscow. He co-directed the NEH Summer Institute for College
and University Faculty "Moscow: Architecture and Art in Historical
Perspective," held in Moscow during the summer of 1994, and
has since conducted faculty summer seminars in various parts of
Russia under the auspices of the Russian Institute of Art History.
Below are links to sites containing his photography and text:
Vologda
Regional Culture Department: This rapidly expanding site is
becoming an Internet library for Professor William Brumfield's Russian
publications as well as photos.
Library
of Congress Archive: Meeting of Frontiers: The William C. Brumfield
Collection
Pomor State
University Collection devoted to architecture of the Russian
North.
University
of Washington: The William C. Brumfield Russian Architecture
Collection
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Francis Butler, Ph.D. 1991
fbutler@uiuc.edu Dissertation: Images of Missionaries and Innovative
Rulers in East Slavic Literature from Early Times through the Reign
of Peter the Great
Associate Professor at Northern Illinois University.
Publications:
Book: Enlightener of Rus': The Image of Vladimir Sviatoslavich. Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica Publishers, 2002. Articles:
-
"Who Founded Vladimir-on-the-Kliaz'ma?: The Scholars and the Chronicles." Russian History / Histoire Russe 26 (1999): 1-24.
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"On a Frequently Misidentified Biblical Conflation in the Vita Constantini and Early East Slavic Chronicles." Balkanistica 12 (1999): 1-20.
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"Rukopisnaia tradiciia zhitiia Konstantina-Kirilla na Rusi." In Chteniia po istorii i kul'ture drevnei i novoi Rossii. Materialy konferencii (Jaroslavl'. 7-9 oktiabria 1998 goda): 33-34. Jaroslavl: Institut russkoi literatury RAN (Pushkinskii dom) / Departament kul'tury i turizma administracii iaroslavskoi oblasti / Iaroslavskii istoriko-arkhitekturnyi muzei-zapovednik / Iaroslavskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii universitet, 1998.
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"The Representation of Oral Culture in the Vita Constantini." Slavic and East European Journal 39 (1995): 367-84.
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"A Textological Problem and an Interpretational Problem in the Vita Constantini." Indiana Slavic Studies 7 (1994) (=Proceedings of the 9th Biennial Conference on Balkan and South Slavic Linguistics, Literature, and Folklore, Bloomington, Indiana, 7-9 April, 1994): 217-22.
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"Mechanical Borrowing or Conscious Adaptation?: The Monk Domentijan's Use of the East Slavic Sermon on Law and Grace." Slavic and East European Journal 37 (1993): 442-55.
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"The Hero, the Beasts, and the Sun: Two Germanic Oral-Formulaic Themes in the Slovo o polku Igoreve." Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 30 (1992): 5-21.
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Chris Caes, Ph.D. 2004
caes@ufl.edu Dissertation: Historical Contingency and Conceptions
of the Self in Stalinist-era and Post-Stalinist Polish Literature
and Film, 1950-1960.
Since 2004, Assistant Professor in the Center for European Studies
and the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University
of Florida.
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William J. Comer, Ph.D. 1992
wjcomer@ku.edu Dissertation: The Russian Religious Dissenters
and the Literary Culture of the Symbolist Generation.
I have been in the Department of Slavic Languages at the University of Kansas since 1992, receiving tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in 1999. At KU, I have been the Language Coordinator responsible for curriculum development, teacher training and the administration of the Undergraduate Language Program in Russian. I have taught Russian at all levels, as well as courses in methods of teaching Slavic languages, the integration of technology in language teaching, Russian culture, and the church history of Russia. Since 1998, I have occupied the half-time administrative position of Director of the Ermal Garinger Academic Resource Center, the unit which provides audio, video and computer support for the teaching and research missions of foreign language and humanities departments at KU. Since 1999 I have served in the Pedagogy Division of the Program Committee for the annual AATSEEL conference.
My most recent publications include the chapter “Russia’s History,” in The Russian Context: The Culture behind the Language, a volume edited by Eloise M. Boyle and Genevra Gerhart and published by Slavica Publishers in 2001. The volume stands as a companion piece to Gerhart’s The Russian’s World, although the new text focuses on aspects of high culture that form the common references, knowledge and experience shared by educated Russians. I contributed the articles “How do Dzhon and Dzhein Read Russian? On-Line Vocabulary and its Place in the Reading Process” (coauthored with Leann Keefe) and “Making Our Way toward Teacher Education Programs in the Slavic Languages” to the Slavica volume The Learning and Teaching of Slavic Languages and Cultures (2000).
For more information, see http://www.ku.edu/~slavic/comer_cv.html.
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Anne Dwyer, Ph.D. 2007 (Comparative Literature)
Dissertation: Improvising Empire : Literary Accounts
from the Russian and Austrian Borderlands, 1862-1923
Anne Dwyer, who received her Ph.D. degree in Comparative Literature
(Russian and German), after completing an M.A. program in Slavic
Languages and Literatures (both at Berkeley), is assistant professor
in the Department of German and Russian at Pomona College. Though
her primary allegiance is to the Russian side of the department,
she also occasionally teaches German topics. Anne has two overlapping
fields of research. The first (also the topic of her dissertation)
is the literary treatment of Russia and Austria as multiethnic empires:
here the emphasis is on the production of subjectivity in texts
about travel through the borderlands. She has also begun to work
on fictional, autobiographical, and cinematic writings of the Russian
formalists and their students. Selected publications: "Runaway
Texts: The Many Life Stories of Iurii Trifonov and Christa Wolf."
Russian Review 64 (2005); "Of Hats and Trains: Cultural
Traffic in Leskov's and Dostoevskii's Westward Journeys" Slavic
Review 70: 1 (2011); "Revivifying Russia: Literature,
Theory and Empire in Viktor Shklovskii's Civil War Writings,"
Slavonica 15: 1 (2009). Forthcoming in Russian Review
is the essay "Dostoevskii's Prison House of Nation(s): Genre
Violence in Notes from the House of the Dead."
Anne spent six months of her first sabbatical year as a junior
fellow at the Institute of Human Sciences (IWM) in her hometown
of Vienna, Austria. She especially enjoyed the efficient public
transportation there. Now she’s back in the car culture of
greater Los Angeles, from where she commutes regularly to San Francisco
to see her husband and to enjoy views of the Bay.
For updates, see http://research.pomona.edu/anne-dwyer/
Melissa Frazier, Ph.D. 1995
mfrazier@slc.edu Dissertation: Frames of the Imagination: Gogol’s
“Arabeski” and the Romantic Question of Genre.
I received my Ph.D. in 1995 in time to take up a guest position
at Sarah Lawrence College, just outside New York City. In my second
year there I received a regular position and in the spring of 2002
gained tenure. At Sarah Lawrence I am the Russian dept., which isn't
always easy. The training in comparative literature/theory I got
at Berkeley has been absolutely essential in making connections
with my colleagues here, few of whom know anything about Russian
literature beyond Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; I'm also deeply indebted
to the Slavists back at Berkeley for continuing to offer me all
sorts of advice and especially for helping me get my dissertation
published. There are, though, a lot of advantages to being my own
program. I love teaching language and I have wonderful students
who sometimes study with me three out of four years; by the end
they're actually speaking to me in Russian and I've really watched
them grow up. I can also teach whatever I want in terms of literature,
and I've taken advantage of this freedom to offer a variety of courses
in both Russian and comparative literature, some more traditional,
some less. It's also very easy to collaborate, and in 2002 I team-taught
a course on Soviet literature and film. The necessarily interdisciplinary
and comparative work I do in my teaching has also had an impact
on my research. I'm just finishing a book on readers, writers and
Senkovskii's Library for Reading which places Senkovskii's often
apparently idiosyncratic critical practices in a broader Romantic
context; while Senkovskii has top billing, I work with a very large
cast of characters, some Russian and many more German, French and
especially British. While I'm not quite there yet, at some point
I'd like to leave Senkovskii and the 1830s and focus on Shklovskii
and the 1920s. In everything I have been supported by my family,
Lucy (born in 1994), Rose (born in 1998) and especially Joe, who
has always stayed home and looked after the girls and is now embarked
on the adventure of home-schooling.
Selected publications:
- Romantic encounters: Writers, Readers, and the Library for
Reading.
Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2007.
- "Personae and Personality in O. I. Senkovskij." Russian Literature,
LVI-IV (15 November 2004).
- "Romantic Relationships: Senkovskii and Romantic Literary Criticism."
Romantic Russia, 3-5 (1999-2001) 25-44.
- Erasing the Boundaries of Criticism: Senkovskij, Readers and
Writers.Russian Literature. XLVII-I (January, 2000) 15-32.
- Frames of the Imagination: Gogols Arabesques and the Romantic
Question of Genre. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2000.
- Space and Genre in Gogols Arabeski.Slavic and East European
Journal. 43: 3 (Fall, 1999) 452-70.
- De-familiarizing the Tolstoj of Formalism.Russian Literature.
XLIV-II (August, 1998) 143-158.
- Arabeski, Architecture and Printing,in The Subjects Space:
Empire, Nation and the Culture of Russias Golden Age. Eds. Monika
Greenleaf and Stephen Moeller-Sally. Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1998.
- Kapitanskaia docka and the Creativity of Borrowing.Slavic and
East European Journal. 37: 4 (Winter, 1993) 472-89.
Awarded the 2007 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for "best work
in Romanticism studies."
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Laura Gibbs, Ph.D. 1999 (Comparative Literature: Latin,
Greek, Polish)
laura-gibbs@ou.edu
Academic Positions: University of Oklahoma (instructor), 1999-present
I'm teaching online courses in Mythology & Folklore at the University
of Oklahoma while residing in rural North Carolina. You can find
my courses online at MythFolklore.net.
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Lenore Grenoble, Ph.D. 1986
grenoble@uchicago.edu
Carl Darling Buck Professor of Slavic Linguistics
University of Chicago
Lenore Grenoble is interested in Slavic, Tungusic and languages
of the North, discourse and conversation analysis, deixis, contact
linguistics and language endangerment, attrition, and revitalization.
She currently serves on the Advisory panel of the Hans Rausing Endangered
Languages Documentation Project, housed at London University School
of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Her fieldwork focuses on
languages of Siberia and she is currently engaged in research on
the interrelations between language, culture and environment in
the North.
Selected publications:
- "Syntax meets discourse: Subordination in Slavic,"
in American Contributions to the XIV International Congress
of Slavists. Christina Bethin, Michael S. Flier, and Victor
Friedman, eds.,. Bloomington, IN: Slavica. 2008.
- "Minor and endangered languages," in 1000 Languages,
Peter K. Austin, ed.,
208-233. East Sussex: Ivy Press: 2008.
- Saving Languages. An Introduction to Language Revitalization.
(co-authored with Lindsay J. Whaley.) Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press: 2006.
- "Language Policy in the Former Soviet Union." Dordrecht:
Kluwer. Academic Press: 2003.
- "Evenki." Languages of the World Materials,
(co-authored with Nadezhda Bulatova.) Munich: Lincom: 1999.
- "Deixis and Information Packaging in Russian Discourse."
Pragmatics & Beyond, 50. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Press: 1998.
- Endangered Languages: Current Issues and Future Prospects
(co-edited with Lindsay J. Whaley.) Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press: 1998.
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Patrick Henry, Ph.D. 2006
tunkjr@hotmail.com
Dissertation: Metarealism and the Question of
Russian Postmodernism
Current Position: Political Editor at the Bloomberg
Moscow bureau
It would be somewhat less than accurate to say that I took the
direct route to the Ph.D. After completing my B.A. in Russian at
Middlebury College in 1987, I returned home to Columbia, Missouri,
and taught French at the university there while I applied to programs
in Slavic for the following year.
I arrived at Cal in the fall of 1988 and left with an M.A. in the
spring of 1990. My favorite course during that time was Prof. Karlinsky's
fabulous seminar on verbalism and futurism, in which he exposed
us to the work of Guro, Oleinikov, Poplavskii and Prismanova, along
with many better-known writers. I'll never forget the sight of this
serious, at times imposing scholar reading poems aloud to us with
such evident glee that he seemed on the verge of breaking into song
and dance.
After leaving Cal I dabbled in this and that for a while and eventually
found my way into journalism. I worked as a reporter in Moscow for
three years in the mid-1990s, covering everything from the Moscow
Winter Gorodki Championship to Mikhail Gorbachev's disastrous presidential
bid in 1996, when he received just 0.5 percent of the vote, yet
insisted that he had "established contact" with the Russian
people during the campaign. In 1997 and 1998 I wrote for the Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock and thoroughly enjoyed it.
I came back to Cal in 1999 with the intention of working on the
poetry of the 1970s and 1980s, which I had been translating since the late
'80s. In my dissertation I focused on three of these poets — Aleksandr
Eremenko, Aleksei Parshchikov and Ivan Zhdanov — who came to be known (through
no fault of their own) as "metarealists." I moved to Moscow after
passing my qualifying exams and wrote my dissertation here — definitely not an option
I would recommend to others, as it reduced contact with my committee to
emails and rare in-person meetings. I owe a debt of gratitude to Prof. Matich
and Prof. Ram for their patience and commitment during what proved a rather
lengthy writing process.
I am now the political editor at the Moscow bureau of Bloomberg
news service (www.bloomberg.com).
Like David Herman, a good friend from my first stint in the department,
I continue to play soccer — at an increasingly slow pace —
in an expat league here.
Relevant publications:
- “Ivan Zhdanov” and five other entries will appear
in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Russian Culture,
forthcoming from Routledge.
- Iskusstvo pogloshcheniia, a Russian translation (with
Mark Shatunovskii and Aleksei Parshchikov) of Artifice of
Absorption, an essay by American poet Charles Bernstein.
Forthcoming from OGI (Moscow). The first section of Iskusstvo
pogloshcheniia appeared in Kommentarii 26 (2006).
- Co-author (with Boris Wolfson) of Internet-based exercises
for Nachalo published on the McGraw-Hill website in 2002
and 2003.
- "Kostyor tshcheslavii" (On the history of Russia’s
major writers’ unions since 1991). Novoe literaturnoe
obozrenie No. 48 (2001).
- Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry
Jersey City: Talisman House Publishers, 2000. Editorial board
member and translator.
- The Inconvertible Sky (selected poetry and prose by
Ivan Zhdanov). Jersey City: Talisman House Publishers, 1996. Co-editor
and translator.
- The Right to Err (selected poetry and prose by Nina
Iskrenko). Colorado Springs: Three Continents Press, 1995. Co-editor
and translator.
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David Mohammed Benjamin Lyle Herman, Ph.D. 1993
herman@virginia.edu Dissertation: Representing Otherness: Urban Poverty
in Russian Literature from Karamzin to Nekrasov.
After getting a BA at Haverford and an MA at Bryn Mawr, I came to Berkeley in 1986. Since 1992, I have taught at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. My teaching here moves in a repeating pattern of Russian culture, second-year Russian, a grad course once a year, and occasionally Tolstoy. Since 2001, I've also been the department's director of graduate studies. After finishing my first book, on poverty and imagination, I spent 2 years writing my own second-year Russian textbook for use (for now at least) by my own students here. Currently I'm working on Tolstoy and Gogol and the paradoxes of literary moralists who reject art as a force for evil, continue to practice it, and strive to reinvent it, all at the same time.
Like a lot of people, I found my first years in the teaching profession a real challenge. Trying to write and teach at the same time, especially new courses you've never taught and sometimes never taken (in my case, 13 new courses in the first 3 years) made for a heavy work load, and teaching literature when you're trained mainly to teach language only exacerbated it at the start. Depending on one's colleagues, some American Slavic departments can provide a less than congenial atmosphere for junior colleagues, too. With time, however, most of these difficulties generally come under control.
After working at Monticello for several years, my wife now office-manages a small law firm. In 1998, we adopted a 5-month-old boy from an orphanage in Pakistan. In my spare time, I still play soccer to the extent that the encroachments of age allow and practice my mostly illiterate Urdu on our unsuspecting son.
Publications:
- "Hadji Murat's Silence." Forthcoming in Slavic Review, Spring 2005.
- Poverty of the Imagination: 19th-Century Russian Literature About the Poor (xx + 282 pp.; Northwestern University Press, 2001).
- "Don Juan and Don Alejandro: The Seductions of Art in Pushkin's Stone Guest" . Comparative Literature, Winter 1999
- "Innocents at Home: 'Poor Liza' as a Response to The Letters of a Russian Traveler" Russian Literature XLIV, 1998
- "Allowable Passions in Anna Karenina" Tolstoy Studies Journal, 1995-1996, Special Issue: Anna Karenina
- "Stricken by Infection: Art and Adultery in Anna Karenina and Kreutzer Sonata" Slavic Review, Spring 1997.
- "A Requiem for Aristocratic Art: Pushkin's 'Egyptian Nights'" Russian Review, October 1996.
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Brian Horowitz, Ph.D. 1993
horowitz@tulane.edu Dissertation: M. O. Gershenzon and Intellectual
Life of Russia’s Silver Age.
Professor in Jewish Studies at Tulane University, Sizeler Family
Chair Professor Previous appointment: University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
Presently on a year-long fellowship at the Frankel Center for Judaic
Studies at the University of Michigan, 2011-12.
Selected Publications:
- Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia,
University of Washington Press, 2009.
- Empire Jews: Jewish Nationalism and Acculturation in Nineteenth
and Early Twentieth Century Russia. Slavica Publishers, 2009.
- The Myth of Alexander Pushkin in Russia's Silver Age: M.
O. Gershenzon-Pushinist. Northwestern University Press, 1997.
- Republished in Russian translation: Mikhail Gershenzon Pushkinist:
Pushkinskii mif v serebrianom veke russkoi literatury, Moscow:
Minuvshee, 2004.
- ”Semyon An-sky’s Intellectual Evolution,” Semyon An-sky, ed.
S. Zipperstein; G. Safron, Stanford U. P., expected 2002.
- ”A Jewish Russifier in Despair: Lev Levanda; Polish Question”
in Po-Lin: A Journal Devoted to Polish-Jewish Relations (Brandeis
Univ.) vol. 17, 2003.
- ”A. S. Pushkin’s Self-Projection in the 1830s: Letters to his
Wife,” Pushkin Journal, 3, 2000, 65-80.
- ”A Portrait of a Jewish Philanthropist: Jacob Teitel’s Social
Struggle,” Shofar 18, no. 3, Spring, 1999, 1-12.
- ”A Knight of Free Creativity: Lev Shestov on William James,”
William James in Russia, ed. Joan Delaney Grossman; Ruth Rischin,
expected 2001.
- ”The Tension of Athens and Jerusalem in the Philosophy of Lev
Shestov,” Slavic and East European Journal 43: 1, Spring, 1999,
156-173.
- ”M. O. Gershenzon and George Florovsky (‘Metaphysical Philosophers
of Russian History’),” Canadian-American Slavonic Studies, 34,
no. 3, 365-374.
- ”Unity and Disunity in Landmarks: The Rivalry between Petr
Struve and Mikhail Gershenzon,” Studies in East European Thought,
no. 1, March 1999, 61-78.
- ”Lav Platonovich Karsavin: Historian of Medieval Italy and
Russian Orthodox Theologian,” (in Croatian) Knjizhevna smotra,
ed. Irena Lukshic, 3 (1), 1999, 81-84.
- ”The Demolition of Reason in Lev Shestov’s Athens and Jerusalem,”
Poetics Today 19: 2, Summer, 1998, 71-91.
- ”Jewish Stereotyping: Vasily Rozanov and Jewish Menace,” Shofar
16, no. 1, Fall, 1997, 85-100.
- ”Genrikh Sliozberg: shtrikhi k politicheskomu portretu (“Henry
Sliozberg: a Political Portrait”),” Vestnik Evreiskogo Universiteta
v Moskve 2 (15), Moscow, 1997, 187-203.
- ”Jewish Identity in Russian Culture: The Case of M. O. Gershenzon,”
Nationalities Papers 24: 4, Winter, 1997, 184-200.
- ”Vladimir Ern and his Skovoroda: A Historian and his Philosophical
Antithesis,” The Journal of Ukrainian Studies, guest ed. Michael
M. Naydan, 22, no. 1-2, Summer-Winter, 1997, 97-104.
- ”Unrequited Love for Russia,” Midstream, October, 1996, 37-40.
- ”From the Annals of the Literary Life of Russia’s Silver Age:
The Tempestuous Relationship of S. A. Vengerov and M. O. Gershenzon,”
Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 35, 1995, 77-95; abridged form in
“Oh Rus!” Festschrift to Honor Professor Hugh McLean, eds. S.
Karlinsky, J. Rice and B. Scheer, Berkeley: Berkeley Slavic Specialties,
1995, 406-419.
- ”The End of a Friendship: the Russian-Jewish Rift in Twentieth-Century
Russian Philosophy: N. A. Berdiaev and M. O. Gershenzon,” Russian
Review 53: 4, October, 1994, 497-514. Republished in Twentieth-Century
Literary Criticism, ed. Scot Peacock, New York: Gale 67, 1997,
75-83.
- ”Ot Vekh’ k russkoi revoliutsii: dva filosofa N. A. Berdiaev
i M. O. Gershenzon.” Vestnik russkogo studencheskogo khristianskogo
dvizheniia 166, May, 1992, 89-132.
- ”M. O. Gershenzon and the Perception of a Leader in Russia’s
Silver-Age Culture,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 29, 1992, 45-73.
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Anne Hruska, Ph.D. 2001
ahruska@ahruska.pobox.stanford.edu
Dissertation: Infected Families: Outsider Figures
in the Works of Leo Tolstoy.
I did my undergraduate work in Russian at Bryn Mawr, and came to Berkeley to get my MA and Ph.D. While I'd considered concentrating on Symbolist poetry when I first began graduate school, I found myself increasingly intrigued by the novel in general, and the works of Lev Tolstoy in particular. I wrote my dissertation on ideas of love, belonging, and exclusion in Tolstoy's works. After my Ph. D. I had one-year positions at the University of Missouri and the Pedagogical Institute in Saratov. Now I'm a Teaching Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University. I work in an interdisciplinary program with other post-docs who specialize in everything from Egyptology to German philosophy. I teach a great deal of Russian literature, but also work with philosophy, history, and film.
At the moment, I'm working on rewriting my dissertation for a book. The projected
title is "Infected Families: Tolstoy's Literary Polemics on the
Nature of Love." I'm also finding myself increasingly interested
in the idea of the family novel both in Russia and in the West.
I've already written one article on the subject, and intend to write
at least one more major project on the Russian family novel.
Selected Publications:
-
"Serfdom and Family Values in the Russian Novel, 1847-1880." The Russian Review: Forthcoming.
-
"Why You Should Read The Idiot, and How Best to Go About It." Introduction. The Idiot. By Fyodor Dostoevsky. Bantam Classics Series. New York: Bantam Books. Forthcoming.
-
"Genre: The Family Novel." Oprah.com. 1 Sept. 2004
-
"The Creative Process in Foreign Language Pedagogy" [Tvorcheskii protsess v prepodavanii inostrannogo iazyka]. Voprosy psikhologii i tvorchestva #6. November, 2002. Saratov State University.
-
"Loneliness and Social Class in Tolstoy's Trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, Youth." Slavic and East European Journal 44:1 (Spring 2000) pp. 64-78.
-
"Ghosts in the Garden: Ann Radcliffe and Tolstoy's Childhood, Boyhood, Youth." Tolstoy Studies Journal Vol. 9 (1997) pp. 1-10.
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Andreas Johns, Ph.D. 1996
andreas_johns@hotmail.com Dissertation: Baba Jaga, the Ambiguous Mother
of Russian Folktale.
Andreas Johns published a book based on his dissertation:
Baba Yaga : the ambiguous mother and witch of the Russian folktale
New York : Peter Lang, c2004.
International folkloristics ; v. 3
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Hope Kaspar (Subak-Sharpe)
hopekaspar@hotmail.com
Ph.D. exams (2000)
Russian emigre literature of the 1920s and 1930s
Czech literature and national revival Dissertation (on-going):
Russian emigre literature in Prague, focus on Alfred Bem and Skit (Poetov)
Special: concurrent enrollment in Law School since 2000; J.N. in Law 2002 Publications:
- Czech for Fun. Czech textbook co-authored with Susan Kresin and Filip Kaspar. Published by McGraw Hill and Company. 1997
- Czech for Fun Workbook. Co-authored with Susan Kresin and Filip Kaspar. Published by McGraw Hill and Company. 205 pages
- "And here’s the news: Using newspapers in Czech class," published in Czech Language News, the newsletter of the National Association of Teachers of Czech
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Ingrid Kleespies, Ph.D., 2004
iakl@ufl.edu
Dissertation: Nomad Nation, Wandering Writer:
Writing, Travel, and National Identity in Russian and Polish Literature
(From the Late Eighteenth Century to the End of the Nineteenth Century).
Since 2004, Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic and
Slavic Studies at the University of Florida.
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Konstantine Klioutchkine, Ph.D. 2002
kk014747@pomona.edu
Ph.D. University of California at Berkeley, 2002.
M.A. Herzen University, St. Petersburg, Russia 1991
University of Chicago - special student 1993 Dissertation: Russian Literature and the Press,
1860-1914. Associate Professor of German and Russian, Pomona College
Publications:
- "Turning Tricks, Baring Devices: Vasilii Rozanov as Prostitute."
Slavic and East European Journal. Spring 2011.
- "Between Ideology and Desire: The Rhetoric of the Self
in the Works of Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobroliubov."
Slavic Review. Summer 2009.
- "'I Smoke, therefore I Am': Smoking as Liberation in Russian
Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture," in Smoking
in Russian History. Eds. Matthew Romaniello and Patricia
Starks. New York, Routledge, 2009.
- "Zavetnyi mul'tfil'm: Prichiny populiarnosti 'Cheburashki',"
in Veselye chelovechki: Kul’turnye geroi sovetskogo
detstva. Eds., Il’ia Kukulin, Mark Lipovetsky, Mariia
Maiofis. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008.
- "Between Sacrifice and Indulgence: Nikolai Nekrasov as
a Model for the Intelligentsia." Slavic Review.
Spring 2007.
- "The Kamenskaia Television Series and the Conventions
of Russian Television." Kinokultura 15 (January
2007).
- "Fedor Mikhailovich Lucked Out with Vladimir Vladimirovich:
The Idiot Television Series in the Context of Putin’s
Culture." Kinokultura 9 (July 2005).
- "Boris Akunin: Biobibliographical Essay." Russian
Writers Since 1980 (Dictionary of Literary Biography Series,
vol. 285). Eds. Mark Lipovetsky and Marina Balina. Detroit: Gale,
2003. 3-10.
- "The Rise of Crime and Punishment from the Air
of the Media." Slavic Review. Spring 2002.
- "Sentimental'naia kommertsiia: Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika
N.M. Karamzina" Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 25
(1997): 84-98.
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Susan C. Kresin, Ph.D. 1994
kresin@mail2.humnet.ucla.edu Dissertation: Third Person Reference in Russian
and Czech
Lecturer in Russian and Czech language at UCLA
I've been at UCLA since 1996. I've had the opportunity to teach a wide variety of courses here: mainly Russian and Czech language courses, but also a couple of graduate courses (West Slavic Linguistics and OCS) and independent study courses (Czech theater, privatization in Russia, and other topics). I've enjoyed the chance to teach small classes at a large university. This fall (2004) I'm doing an experiment with the introductory Czech course: I'll teach it at UCLA, as usual, but videoconference it to UCSB (with the help of Berkeley alumnus Larry McLellan, who teaches Russian there).
My primary research interests are language pedagogy and discourse studies (deixis, definiteness, verbal aspect), focusing on Czech and Russian. Selected publications:
- "The Czech Internet: Resources and Applications for Language
Teaching," coauthored with UCLA alumna Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya. Slavic
and East European Journal 47.2 (Summer 2003).
- "Demonstratives, Definite Articles and Clines of Grammaticalization:
Evidence from Russian and Spoken Czech," in Where One’s Tongue
Rules Well: A Festschrift for Charles E. Townsend, ed. by Laura
A. Janda, Steven Franks, and Ronald Feldstein. Slavica 2002.
- A Definite Article in the Making? The Case of Czech ten, in
Pragmatics in 2000: Selected papers from the 7th International
Pragmatics Conference, Vol. 2, ed. by Eniko Nemeth T. Antwerp:
International Pragmatics Association 2001.
- Využití internetu v kursech ceštiny pro zacátecníky (Using the
internet in introductory Czech language courses). Setkání s ceštinou,
Ústav pro jazyk ceský, 2001.
- From Czech to English: Interrelations of Tense and Aspect, in
Kosmas 14.1 (2000).
- Resources and References for the Teaching of Czech, in The Learning
and Teaching of Slavic Languages and Cultures, ed. by Olga Kagan
and Benjamin Rifkin. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers, 2000.
- Singularization and Pluralization in Russian and Czech Aspect,
in Slavic and East European Journal (SEEJ), Fall 2000.
- Ceština hrou. Textbook of introductory Czech (textbook, workbook
and tapes), coauthored with Berkeley alumna Hope Subak-Kaspar,
and also Ilona Koránová and Filip Kašpar. McGraw-Hill, first edition
1997, second edition 1999.
- "Deixis and Thematic Hierarchies in Russian Narrative Discourse,
Journal of Pragmatics, Vol. 30/4 (October 1998).
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Michael Kunichika, Ph.D. 2007
mmk@berkeley.edu
Dissertation: The Penchant for the Primitive:
Archaeology, Ethnography, and the Aesthetics of Russian Modernism
In the 2007-08 academic year, I will be teaching at Amherst College.
The following year, I will begin a tenure-track position in the
Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University.
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Ellen R. Langer, Ph.D. 2001
erlanger@berkeley.edu
Dissertation: Individuality and grammar : instrumental
singular variation in nineteenth-century Russian literary prose.
Lecturer in Czech at the University of California, Berkeley. See webpage "Faculty."
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Karin Larsen, Ph.D. 2002
karinl@hum.ku.dk Dissertation: The evolution of the system of long
and short adjectives in medieval Slavic and Old Russian.
I currently hold a post doc. position at University of Copenhagen as a
member of a research group on grammaticalization. The topic of my
contribution to the project is the development of the system of long and
short forms of adjectives in 16th to 18th century Russian.Two thirds of my appointment consists of research and one third of teaching.
The first course I taught was "Intensive Elementary Russian", a
two-semester course for students with no previous knowledge of Russian, 10
hours a week. This academic year I teach two courses an undergraduate
course on "Russian Syntax" and a graduate course on "Representative
Readings in Russian" covering texts from the 18th, 19th and 20th century.
In addition, I am putting the final touches to a slightly revised version
of my dissertation for publication.
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Traci Lindsey, Ph.D. 2011
tlindsey@berkeley.edu
Dissertation: Bulgarian Verbs of Motion: Slavic
Verbs in a Balkan Context (2011).
Traci Lindsey is The James R. Gray Lecturer in the Department of
Slavic Languages and Literatures at Berkeley for 2011-12. She is
teaching Reading and Composition and Bulgarian.
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Ann Marsh Flores, Ph.D. 2004
annmarsh94703@yahoo.com Dissertation: Literary Collaboration and the Rise
of the Russian Woman Writer: or, How Zinaida Volkonskaia Learned
To Write in Tsarist Russia Masters Degree in Information Management and Systems
I have known since the fifth grade that I wanted to study Russian literature. Aided and abetted by my best friend, I drew a waxy crayon rendition of Saint Basil’s Cathedral and inadvertently began an odyssey far-outlasting the portrait (said portrait having perished during my friend’s own transition from college to graduate school). Despite my attempts to win the contest for the longest-running dissertation in the history of the Slavic Department, the valiant efforts and coaching of my committee finally convinced me to complete my dissertation. Along the way, I managed to acquire a mortgage payment, a car payment, two small children (who evince no respect for Russian literature whatsoever and who find my complete works of Chekhov to be excellent building blocks for small cities), and a second master’s degree: from UC Berkeley’s School of Information Management and Systems.
Since April 2004, I have been employed by Pixar Animation Studios. Officially, I am the Web Documentation Specialist, a clever and abstruse way of denoting that I am responsible for designing and programming intranets for the feature films currently in production at Pixar. Yes, I get paid to watch movies and come to work wearing flip-flops. Yes, I have my own personal scooter . And, yes, since my position reports to the Dean of Pixar University, I also have marvelous opportunities to continue my teaching and to explore the possibilities of online learning and education. Pixar University is precisely what one would expect from the creators of Toy Story II and Finding Nemo: a wonderfully zany mix of topnotch technical training co-existing peaceablywith a complete curriculum in film and the fine arts. We further tempt our students with lunchtime offerings in stone carving, bellydancing, and creative writing. I will be teaching web design courses in the nearer future and hope to introduce as well a lunch time series on Russian literature . Pixar is, after all, the only workplace where I have ever been asked my opinion on the image of the Jew in Russian literature while rummaging in the fruit basket for a decent banana.
I have begun to rewrite my dissertation and will shop it to publishers as
a full-length book. Wittingly or unwittingly, writing my dissertation
also whetted my appetite for creative prose, and I am slowly completing
a historical novel on the nineteenth century serf actress, Parasha
Zhemchugina who tried valiantly-but unsuccessfully-to make it into
earlier drafts of my dissertation.
Publications:
- "Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin on the World Wide Web: An Annotated
Bibliography." Slavic Review (Spring 1999)
- "I blesk i shum i govor balov" in: By Pen and Charm: Women
in the Pantheon of Russian Literature / Piorem i wdziekiem: Kobiety
w panteone literatury rosyskiej. Wanda Laszczak, ed. Opolski University,
1999.
- "Coming out of his closet: Female friendships, Amazonki and
the masquerade in the prose of Nadezhda Durova.” Slavic and East
European Journal (Winter 2003).
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Boris Maslov, Ph.D. 2009 (Comparative Literature)
maslov@uchicago.edu
Dissertation: Pindaric Epinikion and the Evolution
of Poetic Genres in Archaic Greece
Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature, University of Chicago
My current work on Slavic topics falls in three areas: (1) methodology
of comparative literary history, particularly the Veselovskian tradition
of historical poetics; (2) conceptual history of the Christian East
(Byzantium and Eastern Slavdom); (3) reception of classical genres
and topoi in Russian poetry. I have also published on 20th c. Russian
literature (particularly, on Leonid Dobychin and Vladimir Nabokov).
Alongside two other Berkeley Slavic alumni, I am a member of the
Historical Poetics working group (http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/historicalpoetics/).
Recent publications (many of which are downloadable from www.academia.edu):
"Pindaric temporality in German and Russian Romanticism."
Forthcoming in Comparative Literature 64 (2012).
"Comparative Literature and Revolution, or the Many Arts of
(Mis)reading Alexander Veselovsky." Forthcoming in a special
issue of Compar(a)ison: An International Journal of Comparative
Literature 2011.
"Prisvoenie k Bogu / Oikeiosis pros theon: The afterlife
of a Stoic concept in Old Rus'." Forthcoming in V. Izmirlieva,
ed. Translation and Tradition in Slavia Orthodoxa. Vienna.
"Rozhdenie i smert' Dobrodeteli v Rossii: o mekhanizmakh propagatsii
poniatii v diskurse Prosveshcheniia" Forthcoming in A. Miller,
I. Schierle, eds. Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia sfera v Rossii
ot Petra I do 1914 g. [The socio-political sphere in Russia
from Peter the Great to 1914] Moscow: NLO.
"Tyutchev Pindaricus: opyt genealogii poetiki Tyutcheva 1820-1840
gg." Die Welt der Slaven 55 (2010) 234-64.
"Ot dolgov khristianina k grazhdanskomu dolgu (ocherk istorii
kontseptual'noi metafory)." In: Ocherki istoricheskoi semantiki
russkogo iazyka rannego Novogo vremeni, ed. V. Zhivov, 201-70.
Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh ku'tur, 2009.
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David Matthews, Ph.D. 1997
matthews@cyberus.ca Dissertation: Case Variation in Contemporary Standard
Russian.
After graduation, we decided to settle in Ottawa, in our home country. After a period of unemployment, a series of temporary office jobs led to a responsible position as a Senior Real Estate Analyst at NAV CANADA, the private, not-for-profit corporation that operates Canada’s air traffic control system. I negotiate leases and other agreements with airports, government agencies and private landlords. (On one or two occasions, I was able to assist our executives in their dealings with the Air Navigation Service of the Russian Federation.) For a time I did translating work (Russian to English, Czech to English, French to English) as well. I teach a Bible study course at a local church.
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Julia McAnallen, Ph.D. 2011
Dissertation: The History of Predicative Possession
in Slavic: Internal Development vs. Language Contact (2011).
Julia McAnallen is the first recipient of the IE - UC Berkeley
International Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship at IE University
(Instituto
de Empresa) in Segovia, Spain for the 2011-12 academic year. (Jointly
sponsored by UC Berkeley's Townsend Center for the Humanities.)
She received a BSE in engineering from the University of Michigan
in 2001.
In her graduate career at Berkeley, she was the recipient of several
fellowships, including a Fulbright dissertation award. She traveled
to
Russia, the Czech Republic, and Germany on extended research trips,
and
presented her work at several scholarly conferences in the US and
Europe.
Her publications include both joint and single-authored papers in
the
journal Russian Linguistics.
Julia McAnallen is currently engaged in research on the linguistic
expression of possession in Slavic languages (book project), the
Russian
database and chapter for the World Loanword Series (by invitation),
and an
interdisciplinary project in linguistics and population genetics
that seeks
to improve understanding of prehistoric and historical Slavic migrations.
Her research projects are united by an underlying interest in understanding
the ways that Slavic (mainly Northern Slavic) languages behave at
boundaries and in flux, and in how these linguistic processes are
inextricably embedded in social and cultural contexts. More generally,
she
is interested in using patterns in Slavic languages to better understand
language contact and spread phenomena across the globe.
At IE University in Segovia, Spain, Julia McAnallen is teaching
two
courses she designed in the humanities and communications programs
--
"Humans on the Move: Mapping human histories through languages
& genes"
(fall 2011) and "Freedom of Speech" (spring 2012) -- and
advising an
undergraduate research project on the minority Slavic languages
of Germany
and Italy.
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Ann McDevitt Miller, Ph.D. 2000
amiller@stmarys-ca.edu Dissertation: The Struggle to Create the New Man:
The Literary Criticism and Career of Vladimir Friche.
After graduation, I taught as a lecturer at St. Mary’s College of California
in their “Great Books” Seminar program. For a few years
I taught beginning and intermediate Polish at Stanford to the very
few students who signed up through the Special Languages Program
there. I also co-taught an adults’ class of Polish at a weekend
school primarily geared for the children of Poles.
In 2007 I began to make a move from lecturing at Saint Mary's College
to public librarianship. I'm now a full-time youth services library
assistant at the Lafayette Library in the Bay Area. I'm working
on my masters in Library and Information Science online through
San Jose State, and I hope to finish it before my daughter Emily
(born 1/04) enters middle school. I eventually hope to become a
children's librarian. I enjoy leading storytimes, participating
in book club discussions, and working on collection development.
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Grace Morsberger, Ph.D. 1997
morsbergerg@doaks.org
Dissertation: The Russian Woman Writer in the
Salon: Issues of Gender and Literary Space
From September of 2001 to the present I have been working as Managing Editor at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C. My responsibilities include editing scholarly manuscripts and keeping abreast of developments in the fields of Byzantine and pre-Columbian studies and landscape architecture. I also worked for a time as a freelance editor for the Hillwood Museum (Russian and French decorative arts), for whom I edited a book on Russian glass and another on French furniture. I first worked briefly for two nonprofit organizations that support restoration work in Russia: A-FORCE (American Friends of the Russian Country Estate) and the Faberge Arts Foundation. I then worked at the Holocaust Museum for two years, from 1999 to 2001, as assistant editor of the scholarly journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies, an academic triquarterly published by Oxford University Press in association with the museum and considered the leading journal in its field. I continued to edit articles for it on a freelance-basis for the first year after I left the museum.
I tried, intially, to keep up with the Slavic field: I was a discussant on a Gogol’ panel (one of the presenters was [Berkeley alumnus] Chris Putney) for SSCS a few years back, attended AAASS one year, and was invited to give a paper on a AAASS panel on Russian women writers’ negotiations of (male) Romantic tropes. [Berkeley alumnus] David Powelstock was one of the other presenters. More recently, work and family have taken precedence, and I have contented myself with following the SEELANGS and AWSS listservs and with reading Slavic Review.
For both personal and geographic reasons (my husband’s work keeps us in D.C.) I opted not to pursue an academic position and, instead, tried to figure out how to parlay my research, writing, and editing skills into an alternate career. I’ve been very fortunate--one thing has led to another and I find myself in a job that seems to suit both my skills and my temperament and that leaves me time for my family as well. My husband works for the IMF and although we have different fields (he’s an economist) our work seems to dovetail nicely--he’s done a lot of work on former Soviet states and was working on Rwanda and Bosnia while I was at the Holocaust Museum. We have two children, Emma and Jake.
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Eric Naiman, Ph.D. 1991
Dissertation: Sexuality and utopia : the debate
in the Soviet 1920s.
Associate Professor in Departments of Slavic Languages and Literature
and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
See Faculty page.
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Elena Nelson, Ph.D. 2011
elena.nelson@rochester.edu
Dissertation: Tradition and Innovation in Russian
Church Slavonic Hymnography
Elena Morabito Nelson received her BA in Modern Languages and Cultures
from the University of Rochester in 2001, and then her MA in Slavic
Languages and Literatures from the University of Toronto in 2002.
During her graduate career at Berkeley, she engaged in research
in Bosnia, Serbia, and Montenegro, including the projects “Creating
a Bosnian Language Corpus” and “Language and Politics
in Montenegro”. She has presented papers at various academic
conferences in the US and in the UK and has co-authored a publication
in the journal Russian Linguistics.
Elena Morabito Nelson is keeping active in academia part time while
taking care of her 2-year-old daughter, Mary. She currently teaches
Russian at the University of Rochester and is preparing an article
for publication, “Analyticity in Orbanici Cakavian and Language
Contact.” She created a foreign language department for CALCampus,
an online school, and is designing online courses in Russian and
French. In addition, she teaches online courses in Cultural Perspectives
in Second Language Acquisition and English Linguistics.
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Anne Nesbet, Ph.D. 1992
Dissertation: The Aesthetics of Violence in Russian
and East German Literature (1992). (Comparative Literature Department)
Associate Professor in Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
and Film Studies Program. See Faculty
page.
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William Nickell, Ph.D. 1998
bnickell@cats.ucsc.edu Dissertation: Tolstoy in the Public Domain: His
Death as a National Narrative.
Lecturer in Russian language and literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Renee Perelmutter,
Ph.D. 2008
rperel@ku.edu
Dissertation: Referential Negation: Syntax/Semantics
of Negative Constructions and Their Interaction with Narative Structures
in Modern Russian
B.A. Linguistcs, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, 2001
Entered Berkeley Program in 2001
Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures 2008 (Linguistics)
Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
and Jewish Studies Program at the University of Kansas, Lawrence
(since 2008).
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Jillian Porter, Ph.D.
2011
jillianporter@ou.edu
Dissertation: Money and Mad Ambition: Economies
of Russian Literature 1830-1850 (2011).
In 2011, Jillian Porter joined the Department of Modern Languages,
Literatures, and Linguistics at the University of Oklahoma as Assistant
Professor of Russian (a tenure-track position).
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David Powelstock, Ph.D. 1994
pstock@brandeis.edu
Dissertation: Poet as officer and oracle : Mikhail
Lermontov's aesthetic mythology.
Assistant Professor of Russian Language and Literature at Brandeis
University.
Previous appointments: University of Chicago.
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Christopher R. Putney, Ph.D. 1996
crputney@email.unc.edu Dissertation: Diabolic Conditionality: Nikolaj
Gogol’’s Aesthetics of Evil.
Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (at UNC since 1995). Selected Publications:
-
Book: Russian Devils and Diabolic Conditionality in Nikolai Gogol’s Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.
- Book Chapter: “Gogol’s Theology of Privation and the Devil in ‘Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and His Auntie.’” In Gogol: Exploring Absence. Negativity in 19th- Century Russian Literature. Ed. Sven Spieker. Bloomington, Ind.: Slavica, 1999.
- Co-edited book: Lubensky, Sophia, Gerard L. Ervin, and Donald K. Jarvis. Nachalo: When in Russia. 2 vols. Eds. Thalia Dorwick, Christopher Putney, Larry McLellan, and Carol Dondrea. San Francisco: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 1996.
- "Gogol’s Modeling of Reception Aesthetics in Dead Souls and The Inspector General: Affinities with E. T. A. Hoffmann and Wolfgang Iser.” Canadian-American Slavic Studies, v. 33, no. 1, Spring 1999. Pp. 30-46.
- "Acedia and the Daemonium Meridianum in Nikolai Gogol’’s ‘Povest’ o tom, kak possorilsia Ivan Ivanovich s Ivanom Nikiforovichem.” Russian Literature, v. XLIX, no. III, April 2001 (in press).
- ”The Curious Theodicy of the Kievan Caves Paterikon.” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, v. 44, nos. 3 and 4, 2000, pp. 263-278.
- ”Simon Karlinsky.” In Gay and Lesbian Literature. Vol. 2. Eds. Tom Pendergast and Sara Pendergast. Detroit: St. James Press, 1998.
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Ruth Rischin, Ph.D. 1993
Dissertation: Semën Iushkevich (1868-1927)
: the man and his art.
Selected publications:
• William James in Russian culture, edited by Joan
Delaney Grossman and Ruth Rischin (Lanham [Md.] : Lexington Books,
2003).
• "Miserere." Semyon Yushkevich, A Literary Biography
(forthcoming).
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Kathryn Schild, Ph.D. 2011
kschild@tulane.edu
Dissertation: Between Moscow and Baku: National
Literatures at the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers (2010).
After Berkeley, Kathryn Schild joined the faculty of Germanic and
Slavic Studies at Tulane University as a Visiting Assistant Professor,
with a two-year appointment.
A native of Alaska, she lived and studied in Chi?inau, Moldova,
and St. Petersburg while still in high school. She earned her bachelor's
degree at Princeton University, and attended summer programs at
Moscow State University, and Bogaziçi University in Istanbul.
Her research interests include how literature presents identity,
power, and nationality; Soviet literary politics; and cross-cultural
encounters. Her dissertation argues for a new understanding of Soviet
literature as multinational. In addition to Russian, she works with
other languages of the former Soviet Union, including Azeri and
(Moldovan) Romanian, and the intersection of Russian and Turkish
literature.
At Tulane, she teaches Russian language (first year, second year,
and upper-level independent studies) and a variety of literature
courses: a nineteenth-century survey course titled "Literature,
Nation, and Empire," Tolstoy and Dostoevsky ("The Wages
of Sin"), Literature and Revolution, and Soviet and Post-Soviet
Culture. At Berkeley, she taught a survey on Slavic culture, Russian
language, and a class on murder in Russian literature.
She is an enthusiastic traveler, cook, and reader.
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Peter Scotto, Ph.D. 1987
pscotto@mtholyoke.edu Dissertation: The image of Puskin in the works
of Marina Cvetaeva
Associate Professor in the Department of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Mount Holyoke College.
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Sarah Shull, Ph.D. 2000
lysand@hotmail.com Dissertation: The Experience of Space: The Privileged
Role of Spatial Prefixation in Czech and Russian. Interests: Cognitive linguistics and cognitive
science, especially cognitive semantics; neurolinguistics; connectionist
modeling of language behavior. Travel: Dissertation research and teaching preparation
took me to Prague for a summer (1992), and later a full year (1995-6),
St. Petersburg, Russia for a summer (1997), and on an amazing adventure
to Lake Baikal in Siberia for a summer (2000). Publications:
- "A cross-linguistic semantic analysis of Czech and Russian ‘spanning’
prefixes,” Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics
Society, v. 25.
- G. J. Wilson, S. E. Shull, NI Nabor, R Cooke, "Inhibition of
Muscle Force by Vanadate,” Journal of Biochemistry, Sept. 1997,
122 (3), 563-71.
- G. J. Wilson, S. E. Shull, R. Cooke, "Myosin head interactions
in Ca2+-activated skinned rabbit muscle fibers,” Biophysical Journal,
Jan 1995, 66 (1), 216-226.
- S. J. Hasan, B. N. Nelson, J. I. Valenzuela, H. S. Keirstead,
S. E. Shull, D. W. Ethel, J. D. Steeves, “Functional repair of
transected spinal cord in embryonic chick,” Restorative Neurology
and Neuroscience, 1991, 2, 137-154.
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Victoria Somoff, Ph.D. 2007
Dissertation: From Authority to Author: Russian
Prose on the Eve of the Novel, 1820-1850
Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College.
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Sabine Stoll, Ph.D. 2001
stoll@eva.mpg.de
Dissertation: The Acquisition of Russian Aspect. Current position: Post-doc at the Max Planck Institute
for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. I am working in
the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology comparing,
Russian, German and English language acquisition.
Education and Professional experience:
Member of the Executive Committee, Berkeley Language Center, U.C. Berkeley, August 1999 - May 2000.
Researcher, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 1994 - 1997.
Researcher, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, 1993 - 1994
M. A. Slavic Linguistics, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, 1993. Publications:
- Kognitive Entwicklung und Spracherwerb. In: Haberzettl S., Wegener,
H. (eds.). 2003. Spracherwerb und Konzeptualisierung. Peter Lang
Verlag, 127-138.
- On the desinence {-t(‘)} of the Early East Slavic imperfect.
Russian Linguistics, 24, Heft 2, 2000.
- The role of Aktionsart in the acquisition of Russian aspect.
First Language 18, 351 - 77, 1998.
- Formirovanie ponimaniia sovershennogo vida u russkikh detei
doshkol’nogo vozrasta In: Problemy detckoi rechi. St.Petersburg:
Obrazovanie, 1996.
Select Presentations:
- Beginning and end in the acquisition of Russian aspect. International
Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Santa Barbara, Juli 2001
- Kommunikativer Kontext und kognitive Entwicklung im Erwerb
des russischen Verbalaspekts. 23rd Annual Meeting of the German
Society for Linguistics, Leipzig, March 2001
- Communicative context and cognitive development in the acquisition
of Russian aspect: the ingressive vs. telic Aktionsart. 2nd Northwestern
Conference on Slavic Linguistics. March 2000.
- Tense in Slavonic with special emphasis on the past tense system.
Invited Lecture, Cambridge/England. January, 1999.
- Teaching Russian aspect: A case of grammatical harassment?
Berkeley Language Center Lecture Series, May 1999.
- The acquisition of Russian aspect and Aktionsarten: a context-driven
approach. University of Sidney, Department of Linguistics; Australian
National University, Department of Linguistics, November 1999.
- Cyril and Methodius. Outreach Conference, U.C. Berkeley, July
1999.
- The role of Aktionsart in the acquisition of Russian aspect.
VII. International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Istanbul,
July 1996.
For more information, see http://email.eva.mpg.de/~stoll/
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Jon Stone, Ph.D. 2007
jon.stone@fandm.edu
Dissertation: Conceptualizing "Symbolism":
Institutions, Publications, Readers, and the Russian Propagation
of an Idea
Assistant Professor of Russian and Russian Studies, Franklin &
Marshall College
Jon Stone’s scholarly interests encompass the literary, cultural,
and aesthetic movements associated with the end of the nineteenth
and beginning of the twentieth centuries. He works on Symbolism,
decadence, modernism, and later realism. He employs an interdisciplinary
and comparative approach to the study of Russian and European literature.
In particular, his interests reside in an exploration of “isms”
– the expression of aesthetic affinity in group terms. As
his current projects show, he takes into account the context of
literature’s creation – the living people behind such
concrete institutions of publishing and writing as the journals,
critical reviews, poetic cycles, and publishing houses essential
to producing literature. His work seeks to demonstrate the nuanced
interplay between texts and the larger social, theoretical, artistic,
and cultural forces behind them.
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Hope Subak-Kaspar (Subak-Sharpe)
hsubakkaspar@hotmail.com
Ph.D. exams (2000)
Russian émigré literature of the 1920s and 1930s
Czech literature and national revival
Dissertation (on-going): Russian émigré
literature in Prague, focus on Alfred Bem and Skit (Poetov)
Special: concurrent enrollment in Law School since
2000; J.D. in Law 2002
After completing my Ph.D. exams, I started working on a law degree
at Boalt Hall School of Law. With my J.D. in hand and the California
Bar Exam behind me, I embarked on life as an associate at Shearman
&Sterling LLP’s San Francisco office. The work was interesting
and my colleagues enjoyable, but when my second daughter was born
I left the firm so that I could spend more time with my family.
I currently live in Prague, with my husband, Filip, and our two
daughters, Ema and Aneka. My experiences with my own children
sparked my interest in children’s education. Now I typically
spend mornings with Czech school children, afternoons with my own
children and also work as a freelance translator, mainly from Czech
to English. Life in the Czech Republic has given me the opportunity
to improve my ironing and other housekeeping skills, develop my
open-faced sandwich recipe repertoire and hone my proficiency in
mushroom hunting and wild boar tracking. It has also allowed me
to turn my attention back to Prague’s First Republic Russian
émigré community. In my free time I can now be found
at Klementinum’s beautiful Slavonic Library.
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Alyson Tapp, Ph.D. 2011
alytapp@gmail.com
Dissertation: From the Elegy to the End of the
Novel: Literary Experiences of Emotion (2011).
Upon graduation with a Ph.D. in 2011, Alyson Tapp joined the Russian
Department at Reed as Visiting Assistant Professor.
She gained her undergraduate degree in Modern & Medieval Languages
at Cambridge University (U.K.) and an M.A. at the University of
Sheffield (U.K.).
Alyson Tapp specializes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
Russian literature, with particular emphasis on the history and
theory of the novel. Her current research focuses on narrative,
emotion and the Russian novel. The literature and culture of the
Soviet 1920s-30s also remain a long-standing teaching and research
interest. She has a special interest in the prose works of literary
scholars, and has written on the Russian Formalist Boris Eikhenbaum
and translated literary essays by Lidiia Ginzburg. Other publications
include "Reading and Riding St . Petersburg's Trams" in
Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900-1920 and "Moving
Stories: Emotion and Narrative in Anna Karenina." In conjunction
with the former, at Berkeley Alyson Tapp participated in the digital
mapping project, Mapping Petersburg at Berkeley (http://stpetersburg.berkeley.edu/).
At Reed this year Alyson Tapp is teaching first-year Russian, a
survey of Russian literature From Its Beginnings to Lermontov, and
a course on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the English Novel.
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Lillian Vallee, Ph.D. 2004
Lillian Vallee was born in Hamburg, Germany, to Polish parents displaced by World War II. She grew up in Detroit, Michigan, but has spent most of her adult life in California, the last twenty years in California’s Central Valley.
Vallee has degrees in English Literature (B.A.) and Slavic Languages and Literatures (M.A., Ph.D., with a specialization in Polish literature), all from the University of California, Berkeley. While attending U.C. Berkeley, Vallee received a number of scholarships, including a Stanford-Warsaw Exchange scholarship, a Fulbright fellowship, and two National Defense Language scholarships to pursue study of Polish and Polish literature. Her passion is the literature and history of the interwar period (1918-1939) in Poland, with a special interest in the writings issuing from Polish “borderlands.” Vallee’s dissertation, entitled Bear with a Cross: Primordial Tradition in the Work of Czeslaw Milosz, testifies to an abiding interest in the work of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, whose poetry, like that of Adam Mickiewicz before him, expresses a distinct Polish-Lithuanian ethos earning both poets the sobriquet of “children of millennia.”
Vallee also served an apprenticeship as a translator with Czeslaw Milosz; one of their collaborations, a volume of Milosz’s poetry entitled Bells in Winter, was one of only two volumes of Milosz’s poetry available in English when he won the Nobel Prize in 1980 and the only one in print at the time. For the last two decades Vallee has translated over a dozen books and scores of articles and poems from the Polish; she has been honored with a National Endowment for the Humanities Translation Grant, a Wheatland Foundation grant, the Konstanty Jelenski Translation Prize, and the Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation Award for Translation, among other prizes, for her translation work.
In addition to Vallee’s scholarly interest in Slavic languages and literatures, she is also an active poet and essayist. She has published over 170 translations, articles, reviews, and poems and has given more than 90 public talks, lectures and readings on a variety of subjects, from the natural history of California’s Central Valley to contemporary Polish poetry. She is one of the featured poets in Highway 99, A Literary Journey through California’s Great Central Valley, and the author of three chapbooks—Vision at Orestimba, Erratics, and handful of snow, which are tributes to the natural and cultural heritage of the Central Valley and to her own upbringing as the daughter of Polish immigrants. As an instructor of English at Modesto Junior College, Vallee enjoys teaching all levels of composition courses as well as poetry writing and critical thinking. Her courses often have an interdisciplinary and “regional” flavor.
Vallee writes a monthly column, “Rivers of Birds, Forests of Tule: Central Valley Nature and Culture in Season,” in Stanislaus Connections. The short essays capture her enthusiasm as an amateur naturalist devoted to the Central Valley bioregion. For the past nine years, as volunteers for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Vallee and MJC students have worked on grassland and freshwater marsh restoration projects at San Luis and Merced National Wildlife refuges. At last count, volunteers had planted over a half million trees and eliminated at least an equal amount of noxious weeds in an effort to restore some of the Central Valley’s legendary wetlands, so crucial to migratory wildlife.
As a graduate of the University of California, Vallee sees public service and private scholarship as compatible, mutually enriching activities, beneficial to the public, by generating thoughtful advocacy for the public good, and to the scholar, by grounding language in fact and experience.
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Anthony Vanchu, Ph.D. 1990
avanchu@ems.jsc.nasa.gov (work)
tonyvch@aol.com(home) Dissertation: Jurij Olesa’s Artistic Prose and
Utopian Mythologies of the 1920s. 1990.
Director, NASA Johnson Space Center Language Education Center
Since 1998 I have been working for a private comany, TechTrans International, Inc. in Houston Texas. TechTrans currently holds the NASA contract for foreign language and ESL instruction at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas (we also do interpretation, translation, and logistics for NASA). I have worked for TechTrans in the following capacities: 1998 Russian Language Instructor; December, 1998 - June, 2000 Russian Language Program Director July 2000-present, Director, NASA Johnson Space Center Language Education Center.
We have a thriving program at the JLEC. Most of the foreign lanugage
instruction is in Russian, providing basic and advanced language
training for astronauts and other personnel who have regular contact
with their Russian colleagues. Most important for us is the preparation
of American crew members for the International Space Station-they
need to have sufficient Russian language competency to do the requisite
training in Russia as well as fly one the ISS with their Russian
colleague(s) and, at times, to speak with Russian ground control.
Astronauts are generally taught in tutorials, while we teach group
classes for the non-astronaut student population. We have some 200
students right now. Besides Russian, we also have some offerenings
in Japanese. Finally we teach ESL to cosmonauts when they are in
Houston for training. We do a lot of creation of our own materials
here. I’ve developed and teach a 4-hour class on pronoucing Russian
ISS (International Space Station) acronyms--even when flight controllers
and others are speaking in English, all the acronyms for the Russian
equipment are spoken in Russian.
Other professional experience:
1988 to 1996 Assistant Professor, Department of Slavic Languages,
University of Texas at Austin
Summer, 1996--NEH Summer Seminar on Gender and Identity in Russian
Literature. Amherst College, Amherst, MA.
1996-1997 Visiting Assistant Professor, Dept. of German & Russian,
Oberlin College
While at Berkeley, besides being a TA for Russian language classes, I did direct the Summer language program in 1987.
Publications:
- "Technology as Esoteric Cosmology in Early Soviet Literature,"
in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, Bernice Rosenthal,
ed., Cornell University Press, 1997: pp. 203-222
- Translations of: Efim Yeliseev, "The Bench"; Vitaly Yasinsky,
"A Sunny Day at the Seaside"; K. E., "The Phone Call." in: Out
of the Blue: Russia's Hidden Gay Literature, An Anthology. Kevin
Moss, ed. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1997; pp. 353-392
- "Teaching Twentieth-Century Russian Literature with Original
Texts: Strategies for Course Design" in: Delbert Philips, ed.
Metodika prepodavanija russkogo jazyka i literatury v Amerike.
Moscow: Syntax, v. 2, 1996; pp. 74-95
- "Escape from 'Tukhlandiia': Cultural and Historical Perspective
in Viktor Erofeev's 'Pis'mo k materi' ('A Letter to My Mother'),"
in O Rus'!: Studia litteraria slavica in honorem Hugh McLean,
Simon Karlinsky, James L. Rice, Barry P. Scherr, eds. Berkeley:
Berkeley Slavic Specialists, 1995; pp. 515-530
- "Cross(-Dress)ing One's Way to Crisis: Evgenii Popov and Liudmila
Petrushevskaia and the Crisis of Category in Contemporary Russian
Culture." World Literature Today. Special Issue: "Russian Literature
at a Crossroads," Winter, 1993; pp. 107-118
- "Lack of Absolute Harmony (on the prose of Evgenii Popov),"
Discovery Magazine, vol. 12, no. 14, 1992; pp. 14-19
- "Desire and the Machine: The Literary Origins of Yury Olesha's
'Ofeliya'," The European Foundations of Russian Modernism, Peter
Barta, ed. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991; pp. 251-295
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Michelle Viise, Ph.D. 2006
mviise@fas.harvard.edu
Dissertation: The Culture of the Christian Orthodox
Printing House in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Poland-Lithuania.
Monograph Editor in the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard
University.
Current Projects:
Horace Lunt’s translation into English of the Primary Chronicle
of Rus´ (Editing for the Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian
Literature)
Miracle Accounts under Petro Mohyla, 1628–1638 (Editing for
the Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature)
Analysis of the relationship between manuscript production and
print production in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania, especially among
the Orthodox Christians
Publication in progress:
Printing, Copying, and Reprinting in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania
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Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Ph.D. 1987
awachtel@casbah.acns.nwu.edu Dissertation: The Russian Pseudo-autobiography
and the Creation of Russian Childhood. 1987.
While still a graduate student at Berkeley, Andrew Baruch Wachtel received a three-year fellowship from the Harvard University Society of Fellows. Subsequently he taught from 1988-91 at Stanford University, where he received tenure in 1991. Since 1991 he has taught at Northwestern University. Currently Andrew Wachtel is Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor in Literature. He served as Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director of the Program in Comparative Literary Studies. He has been recently appointed Dean of Graduate School at Northwestern.
He has published a wide variety of books and articles on Russian and South Slavic literature, culture, and society. His most recent book is Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford University Press, 1998). Earlier books include The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (1990, Stanford University Press), An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford University Press, 1994), and Petrushka: Sources and Contexts (Northwestern University Press, 1998).
In addition to his academic work, Andrew Baruch Wachtel is active as an editor and translator of contemporary Russian and Slovenian poetry and prose. As editor of Northwestern University Press’s series “Writings from an Unbound Europe” he endeavors to identify and publish the most interesting contemporary poetry and prose from Central and Eastern Europe. As a translator, he has concentrated on contemporary Russian and Slovenian poetry. He is the co-author of a bilingual web anthology of Russian poetry, which can be found at www.russianpoetry.net .
A member of the NY Council on Foreign Relations, Andrew Baruch Wachtel is a frequent commentator on WBEZ’s “WorldView,” Channel 11’s “Chicago Tonight,” and WMAQ radio regarding US policy in the Balkans. He has published numerous editorials on issues relating to the former Yugoslavia in the Chicago Tribune and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He has founded and directs the Consortium for Southeast European Studies at Northwestern.
For more information, see: http://www.slavic.northwestern.edu/faculty/wachtel.html
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Molly W. Wesling, Ph.D. 1998
mollywesling@charter.net Dissertation: The Russian Representation of Napoleon:
A Cultural Mythology.
I published my thesis Napoleon in Russian Cultural Mythology in 2001. Since
2007, I’ve been working at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
as program coordinator for the predoctoral Interdisciplinary Training
Program in Education Sciences. My husband Ted Gerber (Berkeley ‘96)
is a professor of sociology and the director of the UW-Madison Center
for Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies. We have
two sons, Nicholas and Oliver.
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Rob Wessling, Ph.D. 1999
rwess@stanford.edu
Dissertation: Semyon Nadson and the Cult of the
Tubercular Poet
After graduating I've been focusing on teaching. I taught courses
on Russian culture and literature at the now defunct Harvey Milk
Institute in San Francisco and Polish language tutorials in Stanford's
Special Languages Program. In Fall 2000 I became a teaching fellow
in the humanities in Stanford’s Introduction to the Humanities Program.
I've taught freshman general humanities seminars on a wide range
of topics for the last four years: "The Good Life," "The
Art of Living," "Power and Passion: Women and Men from
the Bible to the Present," "Bodies in Place: Investigating
Selfhood and Location," and "Poetic Justice: Order and
Imagination in Russia." I really enjoy undergraduate teaching
and have been extremely fortunate to teach not only Russian literature,
culture, and film but also things like Greek and Latin Classics,
Shakespeare, Ancient Japanese Literature, anthropological travel
writing, Early Modern and Modern English literature, and much more.
I work with a diverse set of colleagues who have been a great source
of inspiration and support.
I've been invited back to Berkeley to teach Slavic 45 ("Illness,
Outsiders, and Other Obsessions, an Approach to 19th-Century Russian
Literature") for Fall 2004 and will also be team teaching a
Stanford humanities course provocatively titled "Sex, It's
Pleasures and Cultures."
Since 2007, Robert Wessling has been serving as the Associate Director
at the Stanford University Center for Russian, East European and
Eurasian Studies
Academic Publications:
- "'Pogib poet…. Pogib poetik': Pushkin, Nadson, i malaia travma"
in a trauma volume to be published by Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie,
edited by Serguei Oushakine, forthcoming 2005.
-
"Vsevolod Garshin and Intelligentsia Fan Hysteria" in Madness and Madmen in Russian Culture, eds. Angela Brintlinger and Ilya Vinitsky, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, forthcoming.
-
"Semen Iakovlevich Nadson" in Russian Literature in the Age of Realism, ed. Alyssa Dinega Gillespie, Vol. 277 in the series Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Group, 2003).
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Boris Wolfson, Ph.D. 2004
bwolfson@amherst.edu
Dissertation: Staging the Soviet Self: Literature,
Theater, and Stalinist Culture, 1929-1939.
BA, The University of Chicago (Fundamentals: Issues and Texts),
1997
Assistant Professor of Russian at Amherst College, affiliated with
programs in Film and Media Studies and European Studies, since 2008.
In 2004-2008, Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures
and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.
Selected Publications:
- "Juggernaut in Drag: Theater for Stalin’s Children."
In Russian Children’s Literature and Culture, ed.
Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova, 173-191. Routledge, 2007.
- "Prose of the Revolution." In The Cambridge Companion
to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko
and Marina Balina, 59-78. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
- "Fear on Stage: Afinogenov, Stanislavsky, and the Making
of Stalinist Theater." In Everyday Life in Early Soviet
Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside, ed. Christina Kiaer
and Eric Naiman, 92-118. Indiana University Press, 2006.
- "Escape from Literature: Constructing the Soviet Self in
Yuri Olesha's Diary of the 1930s." The Russian Review
63 (October 2004): 609-620.
- "C'est la faute a Rousseau: Possession as Device
in Demons," Dostoevsky Studies 5 (2001):
97-116.
For more information see: https://www.amherst.edu/people/facstaff/bwolfson
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Matthew
Zapruder, M.A. 1994
has published a poem, "Tiburon," in The New Yorker, April
15, 2002. His book of poems, "American Linden," came out from Tupelo
Press in 2003.
Tiburon
How sweet to lie just once like a painter,
propped at the top of that hill on my elbow,
considering the conundrum of breath.
Grasses blow among my limbs
as if wisdom had been withdrawn
for safekeeping into the library of fragments.
I have no purpose except to return
back down towards a eucaliptus I love.
Its petals are filled with the terrible weight
of careless reversal, grief without consequence.
It burns with such ease.
Just to stand there below it, dreaming of union,
all trembling and scent and colors of the moment,
is like living inside a flower
while making a study of winter.
Blue span that leads to a gleaming city,
You cannot be crossed by longing.
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Alumni Biographies:
- Anthony Anemone, Ph.D. 1985
- Matthew Baerman, Ph.D. 1999
- Polina Barskova, Ph.D. 2006
- Neil Bermel, Ph.D. 1994.
- Evgenii Bershtein, Ph.D. 1998
- Avram Brown, Ph.D. 1998
- Molly Brunson, Ph.D. 2009
- Roy Chan, Ph.D. 2009
- William Craft Brumfield,
Ph.D. 1973
- Francis Butler, Ph.D. 1991
- Chris Caes, Ph.D. 2004
- William J. Comer, Ph.D. 1992
- Anne Dwyer, Ph.D. 2007
- Melissa Frazier, Ph.D. 1995
- Laura Gibbs, Ph.D. 1999
- Lenore Grenoble, Ph.D. 1986
- Patrick Henry, Ph.D. 2006
- David Herman, Ph.D. 1993
- Brian Horowitz, Ph.D. 1993
- Anne Hruska, Ph.D. 2001
- Andreas Johns, Ph.D. 1996
- Hope Kaspar (Subak-Sharpe)
- Ingrid Kleespies, Ph.D., 2004
- Konstantine Klioutchkine,
Ph.D 2002
- Susan C. Kresin, Ph.D 1994
- Michael Kunichika, Ph.D. 2007
- Ellen Langer, Ph.D 2001
- Karin Larsen, Ph.D 2002
- Traci Lindsey, Ph.D. 2011
- Ann Marsh Flores, Ph.D. 2004
- Boris Maslov, Ph.D. 2009
- David Matthews, Ph.D. 1997
- Julia McAnallen, Ph.D. 2011
- Ann McDevitt Miller, Ph.D.
2000
- Grace Morsberger, Ph.D. 1997
- Eric Naiman, Ph.D. 1991
- Elena Nelson, Ph.D. 2011
- Anne Nesbet, Ph.D 1992
- William Nickell, Ph.D. 1998
- Renee Perelmutter, Ph.D.
2008
- Jillian Porter, Ph.D. 2011
- David Powelstock, Ph.D.
1994
- Christopher R. Putney, Ph.D.
1996
- Ruth Rischin, Ph.D. 1993
- Kathryn Schild, Ph.D. 2011
- Peter Scotto, Ph.D. 1987
- Sarah Shull, Ph.D. 2000
- Victoria Somoff, Ph.D. 2007
- Sabine Stoll, Ph.D. 2001
- Jon Stone, Ph.D. 2007
- Hope Subak-Kaspar (Subak-Sharpe), 2000
- Alyson Tapp, Ph.D. 2011
- Lillian Vallee, Ph.D. 2004
- Anthony Vanchu, Ph.D. 1990
- Michelle Viise, Ph.D. 2006
- Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Ph.D.
1987
- Molly W. Wesling, Ph.D. 1998
- Rob Wessling, Ph.D. 1999
- Boris Wolfson, Ph.D. 2004
- Matthew Zapruder, M.A, 1994
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