Areas of Interest
The re(dis)covery of the Greeks in the 19th century by the German Romantics and later British, French, and Russian authors, focusing on how these reinterpret Greek myth and religion—and specifically, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.
Talks
Presentation on Vladimir Bortko's film adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog delivered before the Russian Students Clubat John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Spring 2004.
Presented papers on British, Italian, and Ukrainian decadence (Wilde, Fogazzaro, Ukrainka); Russian vitalism (Leontiev); and approaches to teaching myth.
Courses Taught
Regularly taught:
Great Books I, a survey of major works of Western literature (selections from Homer, the three Athenian tragedians, Herodotus, Plato, Virgil and the Roman lyric poets, and Dante), with an emphasis on myth and thematic transformation. Currently teaching: Russia and the West, a survey of nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts in which the West is represented, problematized, satirized, and imagined by Russian writers (Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Platonov, Il'f, Trifonov, and Limonov), focusing on cultural and national myths, stereotypes, and ideologies.
LanguagesFluency in spoken and written Russian and Ukrainian.
Comparative Literature 101, a survey of major works from antiquity (Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Ovid) in conversation with modern texts (Goethe, Racine, Nietzsche, Wyspianski, Freud), with an emphasis on myth, history, and thematic transformation. Also: Romanticism, a cross-national survey of "Romantic" texts from Goethe to Oscar Wilde.
Languages
Fluency in spoken and written Russian and Ukrainian.
Reading knowledge of French and Classical Latin.