Experience
I have been employed as a tenured professor at the University of Notre Dame (assistant 1999-2005, associate 2005-2016), where I co-directed the program in Russian and East European Studies, and at Bowdoin College (2016-2021), where I was chair of the Russian department.
At both these institutions, I taught a wide variety of courses, including Russian language at all levels, Russian literature and culture in translation, Russian literature seminars in Russian, and interdisciplinary topics courses. Some of my favorite courses to teach have been Single and Double Selves, Pushkin (in Russian), Post-Soviet Russian Cinema, and Nature and the Environment in Russian Culture, along with Beginning Russian. I love my work teaching and advising undergraduate students; I feel privileged to be able to introduce them to a new language, new culture, and new ways of thinking and understanding the world.
Over the years, my students have won prestigious recognitions, including Fulbright fellowships, silver and gold medals in the ACTR Post-Secondary National Russian Essay Contest, admission to PhD programs at top universities, and publication of their undergraduate thesis research. To this day I keep in close contact with many of my former students, who have engaged in exciting post-graduate pursuits thanks to their undergraduate Russian studies in far-flung places like St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Tomsk, Russia; Tbilisi, Georgia; Ukhta in Russia’s Komi Republic; Almaty, Kazakhstan; and Öndörkhaan, Mongolia.
My own research throughout my career has focused on 19th- and 20th-century Russian poetry. At base, I am fascinated by the psychology of poetic genius and the myths poets create around their experience of inspiration and the poetic calling. I am the author of A Russian Psyche: The Poetic Mind of Marina Tsvetaeva (University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), which was published in a revised and updated Russian-language edition as Marina Tsvetaeva: po kanatu poezii (Marina Tsvetaeva: Along the Poetic Tightrope; Nestor-Istoriia, 2015) and Poeticheskoe voobrazhenie Pushkina (Pushkin's Poetic Imagination; Academic Studies Press, 2021). I am also the editor of Russian Literature in the Age of Realism (Gale Group, 2003) and Taboo Pushkin: Topics, Texts, Interpretations (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012) and the author of articles on Brodsky, Gorky, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Pawlikowska, Pushkin, Sep-Szarzynski, Tolstoy, and Tsvetaeva.
In addition to my scholarly work, I am an award-winning translator of Russian poetry, having received first prize in the 2012 Compass Awards, second prize in the 2011 Compass Awards, and joint third prize in the 2011 inaugural Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender translation competition; my translations and original poems have been published in several anthologies and in journals such as the New England Review, the Atlanta Review, and Cardinal Points Journal. I am now at work on a book-length collection of my translations of the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, which is under contract for the Russian Library series of Columbia University Press.
My current major scholarly project is a study of the role of crime and conscience in the poetics of Alexander Pushkin, titled Dangerous Verses: Alexander Pushkin and the Ethics of Inspiration, to be published in the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies book series of the University of Wisconsin Press. I am also writing a short critical biography of Pushkin for the Critical Lives series of Reaktion Books.
Most broadly, my research and teaching interests include Russian and Polish poetry, gender issues in literature, the poetry of exile, the psychology of poetic genius, Russian film and artistic culture, poetic translation, and Russian language at all levels. I lived in Moscow for nearly three years and taught English literature in Russian high schools before completing my graduate education.