Front matter for Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century

This course was first taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in fall 2018.
It addresses feminism, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, and critical race and ethnic studies in conjunction with translation studies.

In the 16th century most of Russia is still a terra incognita with a highly dubious and mostly mythologized geography, anthropology, and sociology. In this article we look at some texts of the Early Modern period – Sir Thomas Smithes Voiage and Entertainment in Rushia (1605), Peter Mundy’s Travel Writings of 1640–1641, and The Voiages and Trave…[Read more]

Examines the role of the yeti in shaping Cold War popular science networks and relations between official and popular scientific practices in the Soviet Union.

In his fiction, journalism and letters, Dostoevsky recurrently mentions ethnicity of his protagonists. Russians, Poles, Englishmen, Germans, Turks, Greeks etc. never act as individuals with their personal life but rather as ‘carriers’ of some national idea. Amidst the nations represented in Dostoevsky’s oeuvre, there are some Jews. The fashi…[Read more]

Outlines the restoration of the Russian film classic “Man with a Movie Camera” (USSR, 1929) by Dziga Vertov which was carried out by the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam between 2008 and 2010. The restoration allows contemporary audiences the possibility to once again experience Vertov’s film as the filmmaker originally intended – or at least in a v…[Read more]

In the context of the war between Ukraine and Russia in the Donbass and the earlier crisis over Crimea, this paper examines four speeches by Vladimir Putin to identify and map populist elements in his discursive and formal strategies of justifying and creating a specific form of conflict. The analysis shows how this populism goes beyond the…[Read more]

The article examines the Romanian and American reception of Cristian Mungiu’s 4 weeks, 3 months, 2 weeks (2007), arguing that the film’s representational minimalism indirectly caused an excess of interpretation across cultural contexts. This overinterpretation was possible because the film’s aesthetic minimalism encouraged viewers to decode the s…[Read more]

This essay examines how translingual poetry by immigrant Romanian writers who live in or travel to the United States requires a transnational community framing rather than a national one and raises new questions about cultural and linguistic identity formation that reflect on both national and world literature issues. This analysis of the…[Read more]

CFP for a special issue of the European Journal of Humour Research

Seminar paper for ‘Translating the Nonhuman’, organised by Liam Lewis (University of Warwick) and Haylie Swenson (The George Washington University)

Seminar Abstract — This seminar invites participants to consider the connections created by translations of the nonhuman into human languages. To what extent is language the domain of the human,…[Read more]

This article positions agency as a necessarily lacunal aspect of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. By allowing the theatricality of doubling and metaphor to overdetermine Mustafa’s narrative, the novel implicitly challenges both the substitution of symbol for material experience and the rational logic of causation. The disruptive pot…[Read more]

This article collides St. Apollonia’s medieval passion narratives – manuscript illustrations, church screens, and paintings by Francisco De Zurbarán and Carlo Dolci – with A.L. Kennedy’s contemporary short story “Story of My Life” to find out what happens when we move beyond the theoretical violence imposed by traditional approaches to gothic studies.

This collection of scholarly essays offers a new understanding of local and global myths that have been constructed around Shakespeare in theatre, cinema, and television from the nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on a definition of myth as a powerful ideological narrative, Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance examines…[Read more]

А.Г. Шляпникова арестовали ночью 1-2 января 1935 года и обвиняли в том что он «являлся одним из руководителей контрреволюционной организации рабочей оппозиции.» Он не признавал себя виновным и не обвинял других.

How do Shakespearean plays sustain clashing values within them, or imposed on them? Is Shakespeare anti-Semitic? Can Shakespeare be a feminist? How is value subject to context, to market, and demand? A wide range of moral, political, and aesthetic values—profitable or heartening or threatening from case to case—have been associated with Sha…[Read more]

In the centuries since William Shakespeare’s death, numerous stage and, more recently, film and television adaptations of his work have emerged to inspire, comfort, and provoke audiences in far-flung corners of the globe. As early as 1619, for example, Hamlet was performed in colonial Indonesia to entertain European expatriates. In 1845, U.S. Army…[Read more]

A widely translated author, and a prominent voice from post-communist Europe, Dubravka Ugrešić has published a variety of literary forms in addition to literary criticism and translations. Playful experimentation with language, boundaries between texts, and literary conventions as well as an acute awareness of the contemporary socio-political c…[Read more]

Review of Daniel Hack, “Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature” (Princeton UP, 2017).