Asst. Professor of Russian Literature
Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures
University of Chicago

Ph.D. Slavic Literatures, UC Berkeley (1998)



Current News:


Time, Space and Narrative: A Workshop on Digital Mapping Techniques and Objectives for the Humanities. April 5 and 6, University of Chicago. Lenore Grenoble and I are hosting this workshop, presenting our work on a digital map of Sochi, but also bringing in technical experts and colleagues who are working on similar projects.

Sochi in Six Dimensions: a Project in Rich Cartography will offer background information on the site of the upcoming Olympic games, but will also place the city’s history in broader perspectives. Sochi was a utopian Soviet garden city, where workers could experience and learn to practice the lifestyle that would one day lead to communism. The website will present oral history, historic images, detailed descriptions of medical and cultural treatments, and trace the city’s current conversion into an international business center and Olympic host site. A story on the project appeared on the front page of the Washington Post.

The
film series has been featuring Russian films of the Thaw. Our first sequence focused on coming-of-age films featuring the relationship of boys to missing fathers, and the second examined the hand-held camera work of Sergei Urusevsky. Contact me for more information or to be put on our mailing list.

I am completing work on
A Readers Companion to War and Peace, which is due to come out at the end of this year.

Talks, 2012-13:
Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, Part III. At the Film Studies Center, October 15.
A Living Corpse as a Moving Picture, U.C. Berkeley, October 19
Why Read War and Peace? Humanities Day Lecture, October 20

At ASEEES:
Presentation on Vladimir Chertkov as a “muse” for Tolstoy for the panel Writers’ Demons, Muses, and Guardian Angels.
Discussion of papers presented for the panel Ecological Philosophy and the Environment in Russian Literature of the 19th Century.


Film Series - Winter 2013 (Fridays at 2:30 in Cobb 425):

1. Kak possorilsia Ivan Ivanovich s Ivanom Nikiforivichem (Andrei Kustov and Anisim Mazur, 1941)
2. Bitva za nashu Sovetskuiu Ukrainu (Iuliia Solntseva, Iakov Avdienko, Aleksandr Dovzhenko,1943)
3. Sinegoriia (Erast Garin and Khesia Lokshina, 1946)
4. Sel'skaia uchitel'nitsa (Mark Donskoi, 1947)
5. Aliet ukhodit v goryi (Mark Donskoi, 1949)
6. Kavaler Zolotoi Zvezdy (Iulii Raizman, 1950)
7. Vozvrashchenie Vasiliia Bortnikova (Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1953)
8. Pervyi eshelon (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1955)
9. Urok zhizni (Iulii Raizman, 1955)
10. Sorok pervyi (Grigorii Chukhrai,1956)



Film Series - Fall 2012:

Friday, October 12 Two shorts: The Thesis Films of Andrei Konchalovsky (Malchik i golub, 1961) and Andrei Tarkovsky (Katok i skripka, 1961)

Pervoklassnitsa. Ilya Frez (Soiuzdetfil’m, 1948)
Brat’ia Komarovy. Anatoli Vekhotko (Lenfilm, 1961)
Vstuplenie, Igor Talankin (Mosfilm, 1962)
Shestnadtsataia vesna. Yaropolk Lapshin (Свердловск, 1962)
Veselye istorii. Venyamin Dorman (Gorky, 1962)
Ia kupil papu. Ilya Frez (Gorky, 1962)
Prikliucheniia Toli Kliukvina. Victor Eisymont (Gorky, 1964)
Andrei Rublev. Andrei Tarkovsky (Mosfilm, 1966)