Molly Brunson is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, with a secondary appointment in the Department of the History of Art. She specializes in the literature and visual art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on the recurrent realisms that emerged in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Her first book, Russian Realisms: Literature and Painting, 1840-1890, articulated a theory of realism from the relation between word and image in canonical works of literature and painting. In 2017 Russian Realisms won the award for Best Book in Cultural Studies from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages.