Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough enters the forests of our imagination, looking for stories. Alternative realities, holy quests and fairytales hidden among the glories of the Autumn forest. Despite our evolution in the African rainforests, Eleanor wonders whether it is tales from the frozen North that have given us the most potent forests of the imagination, invading …
B. Venkat Mani’s Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017) is the winner of the 2018 Best Book Prize of the German Studies Association in Germanistik and Cultural Studies (for a book published in 2016 or 2017). This prize is funded through the North American office of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The laudatio reads: B. …
Did you have a good Kanelbullens Dag? I know we at Norden House did! This past Friday Norden House partnered with the Nordic Society for Undergraduates to celebrate one of Sweden’s coolest holidays, Swedish Cinnamon Bun Day! Kanelbullar are similar to cinnamon rolls here in America, but instead of frosting they are coated in a …
Summer 2018 featured a high-school teachers’ workshop on Czechoslovak history in the second half of the 20th century. The workshop was co-sponsored by CREECA and co-facilitated by Slavic professor David S. Danaher. Thirteen teachers from Wisconsin and other states participated. The workshop was designed to promote a modular curriculum available on the web that was developed …
What is or will (or might be) the focus of your dissertation research? I’d really love to explore queer themes in contemporary Russian literature, film, and/or drama. For now that’s still very broad, but that’s the general direction I’d like to go. Given the climate in Russia around homosexuality right now, it’s also possible that I’ll dive …
What is the focus of your dissertation research? My dissertation, still in early stages, is on disability and holy fools in Russian literature. I’m interested in using the familiar figure of the holy fool as a vehicle to bring disability studies values and concepts into the field of Slavic literatures, and in determining the role …
What are your current and future research projects? I am currently developing two book projects. The first investigates the introduction of Western-type science to Russia under Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century. I am interested in the the links between scientific knowledge and political and cultural thinking in Petrine Russia and its Western …
What are your current and future research projects? My main research project right now is a book on Alexander Pushkin. Although I had been exposed to Pushkin’s works in one way or another from an early age, I only became fascinated (alright, obsessed) with them while doing my graduate studies at Columbia thanks to the …
What is the focus of your dissertation research? I’m in my first year here at UW-Madison, but hopefully my dissertation will be focused on translation of Russian poetry from Russian into English. One of my undergraduate theses focused on translation of Fazil Iskander’s poetry, and I am hoping to continue working with his poetry. Which …
Norden House’s first official Filmen Fredag took place this past week in Adams. This week’s film was A Man Called Ove, a swedish dramatic comedy based on the worldwide best-selling novel. The story follows a grumpy old Swedish man named Ove who follows a strict routine in his community. After the loss of his wife, …