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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 Dissertation: Konstantin Vaginov and the Leningrad Avant-Garde: 1921-1934 Academic Positions:
Publications:
See Tony Anemony's home page at: http://aaanem.people.wm.edu/ Matthew Baerman, Ph.D. 1999 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/). Polina Barskova, Ph.D. 2006 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." Neil Bermel, Ph.D. 1994 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 Evgenii Bershtein, Ph.D. 1998 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, I focused on the study of the Russian literature of the eighteenth century and published essays on Nikolai Karamzin and on the genre of “solemn ode.” In Berkeley, my interests shifted to Russian Symbolist culture and, thematically, to sexuality as an aspect of cultural history. My publications include the essays “The Russian Myth of Oscar Wilde” (Self and Story in Russian History, Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler, eds. Ithaca, 2000), “Psychopathia Sexualis in Fin-de-Siècle Russia: Politics and Genre” (Eros and Pornography in Russian Culture, M. Levitt and A. Toporkov, eds., Moscow, 1999) and “The Tragedy of Sex: Two Brief Essays on the Otto Weininger Cult in Russia” (NLO #65, 2004) . I have also been publishing in the Russian magazines Novaia russkaia kniga and Kriticheskaia massa. Here are some samples: on Tatyana Tolstaya’s non-fiction, on Russian gay history, on the HBO series“Sex and the City”. Most recently I have written on the unofficial Soviet writer Evgenii Kharitonov (1941-81) and on treatment of sexuality in the Symbolist theology of Pavel Florensky and Sergii Bulgakov. My works in progress are the monograph entitled Sexuality in Russian Symbolism (it has originated as my Berkeley dissertation) and the collective volume The Scandal of Vasilii Rozanov, co-edited by Harriet Murav and me. Since 1999, I have been teaching at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. At Reed I have offered courses in twentieth-century Russian literature, Russian and European Symbolism, Soviet and post-Soviet culture, the St. Petersburg myth in Russian literature, as well as seminars in Russian poetry. I also teach intermediate and advanced Russian. I have recently helped organize two interesting symposia at Reed: “Music and Terror in Stalinist Russia,” and “Memory and the Past in Postsocialist Cultures” (see http://web.reed.edu/soyuz/). 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). Avram Brown, Ph.D. 1998 1999-2004 Lecturer at the University of California at Davis. Publications:
Molly Brunson, Ph.D. 2009 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. 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. 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. Vologda
Regional Culture Department: This rapidly expanding site is
becoming an Internet library for Professor William Brumfield's Russian
publications as well as photos. Francis Butler, Ph.D. 1991 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:
Chris Caes, Ph.D. 2004 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. William J. Comer, Ph.D. 1992 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. Anne Dwyer, Ph.D. 2007 Melissa Frazier, Ph.D. 1995 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:
Awarded the 2007 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for "best work in Romanticism studies." Lenore Grenoble, Ph.D. 1986 Carl Darling Buck Professor of Slavic Linguistics 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:
Patrick Henry, Ph.D. 2006 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:
David Mohammed Benjamin Lyle Herman, Ph.D. 1993 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:
Brian Horowitz, Ph.D. 1993 Dissertation: M. O. Gershenzon and Intellectual Life of Russia’s Silver Age. Associate Professor of Russian, Director of the Program in Jewish Studies at Tulane University, New Orleans. Previous appointment: University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Selected Publications:
Anne Hruska, Ph.D. 2001 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:
Andreas Johns, Ph.D. 1996 Dissertation: Baba Jaga, the Ambiguous Mother of Russian Folktale.
Andreas Johns published a book based on his dissertation:
Hope Kaspar (Subak-Sharpe) Ph.D. exams (2000) Dissertation (on-going): Publications:
Ingrid Kleespies, Ph.D., 2004 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. Konstantine Klioutchkine, Ph.D. 2002 Ph.D. University of California at Berkeley, 2002. Dissertation: Russian Literature and the Press, 1860-1914. From Fall 2002 Konstantine Klioutchkine is an assistant professor at Pomona College, LA. Publications:
Susan C. Kresin, Ph.D. 1994 Dissertation: Third Person Reference in Russian and Czech Lecturer in Russian and Czech language at UCLA My primary research interests are language pedagogy and discourse studies (deixis, definiteness, verbal aspect), focusing on Czech and Russian. Selected publications:
Michael Kunichika, Ph.D. 2007 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. Ellen R. Langer, Ph.D. 2001 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." Karin Larsen, Ph.D. 2002 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. Ann Marsh Flores, Ph.D. 2004 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:
David Matthews, Ph.D. 1997 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. Ann McDevitt Miller, Ph.D. 2000 Dissertation: The Struggle to Create the New Man: The Literary Criticism and Career of Vladimir Friche. I am a lecturer at St. Mary’s College of California in their “great books” Collegiate Seminar program. Students are required to take four such seminars: Greek Thought; Roman, Christian, Medieval Thought; Renaissance, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Thought; and Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Thought. I have taught the first two of the series, and hope soon to teach the more modern courses as well. I act as the freshman year advisor to my Greek Thought students. I will again be teaching a January Term class on vampires, which lets me dabble a bit in things Slavic. 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. I am no longer teaching Polish at either place, at least for the time being, in order to take care of my daughter Emily (born 1/04). Grace Morsberger, Ph.D. 1997 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. 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 webpage "Faculty." 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 webpage "Faculty." William Nickell, Ph.D. 1998 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. Renee Perelmutter,
Ph.D. 2008 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 Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Jewish Studies Program at the University of Kansas, Lawrence (since 2008). David Powelstock, Ph.D. 1994 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. Christopher R. Putney, Ph.D. 1996 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:
Peter Scotto, Ph.D. 1987 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. Sarah Shull, Ph.D. 2000 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:
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. Sabine Stoll, Ph.D. 2001 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: Publications:
Select Presentations:
For more information, see http://email.eva.mpg.de/~stoll/ Jon Stone, Ph.D. 2007 Dissertation: Conceptualizing "Symbolism": Institutions, Publications, Readers, and the Russian Propagation of an Idea Jon Stone presented two papers during 2007: "Falling into the Symbol: The Russian Reevaluation of Decadence" at AAASS and "Skorpion and the Instantaneous Canonization of Russian Symbolism" at AATSEEL. He was co-organizer of the Decadence conference at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University entitled "A Leap from the Temple of Culture into the Abyss: Decadence in Central and Eastern Europe." He also received the Outstanding GSI award for 2006-2007. He is currently a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. See Faculty page for more information. 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. Anthony Vanchu, Ph.D. 1990 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: While at Berkeley, besides being a TA for Russian language classes, I did direct the Summer language program in 1987. Publications:
Michelle Viise, Ph.D. 2007 Dissertation: The Russian Representation of Napoleon: A Cultural Mythology. Monograph Editor in the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Ph.D. 1987 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 Molly W. Wesling, Ph.D. 1998 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. Rob Wessling, Ph.D. 1999 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:
Boris Wolfson, Ph.D. 2004 Dissertation: Staging the Soviet Self: Literature, Theater, and Stalinist Culture, 1929-1939. BA, The University of Chicago (Fundamentals: Issues and Texts), 1997 Since 2004, Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California. Publications:
Matthew
Zapruder, M.A. 1994 Tiburon How sweet to lie just once like a painter, |
Alumni Biographies:
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