Russian Language & Literature
Русский язык и русская литература в Рид–колледже
News & Events Archive
Jump to:
Departmental News
Visiting Lecturers
At the Russian House
Departmental News
2007-2008
News from our current and recent students: Naomi Dickerson was awarded a $2,500 Initiative Grant for her senior thesis research on Russian Comics. Katya Bellis was awarded a Critical Languages Scholarship to study in Russian in the summer of 2008. Jonah Simpson was admitted for summer language study at Smolny. Matthew Kendall was admitted to summer session at Middlebury and the Middlebury program in Russia in the fall.
Among alumni, Angie Wilson, class of '03 ,Costume Curator at UC Berkeley in the Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies Department, has been admitted to the MFA Program in Textile Design at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Lauren Abman, a senior, has been selected as a Fulbright Fellow to Russia. Molly Cohen, also a senior, was selected as an alternate.
Please join us for the fifth annual Russian department two-week East European tour, January 4-19, 2008, beginning in Istanbul, proceeding to the Ukrainian cities of Kiev and Lvov, and ending in Moscow, with an optional third week in St. Petersburg and Novgorod the Great, January 19-26. The tour will be led by former Reed Russian professor Judson Rosengrant and offers a program of exceptional richness and value. For a detailed itinerary and other information, please contact Dr. Rosengrant at or 503.880.9521.
An essay by Evgenii Bershtein and Jesse Hadden '07 has been published by Art Margins. It focuses on the 2002 pornography case against the writer Vladimir Sorokin and the issues of cultural policy in Putin's Russia. Here is the link to the full text.
2006-2007
Understanding Russian Culture through Film
The Mellon Symposium
March 30–April 1, 2007
Psychology 105
Free and open to the public
The Mellon Symposium presents screenings, discussions, lectures, and scholarly panels that focus on trends, patterns, and mechanisms in Russian culture as seen through cinema. Read more here.
Join us for a two-week Russian tour, January 5-19, 2007, visiting Moscow and St. Petersburg and their extraordinary museums, performance halls, and historical sites, with overnight trips to the ancient towns of Sergiev, Posad, Yaroslavl, Rostov the Great, and Novgorod the Great. The cost is approximately $3,600, including round-trip airfare from Portland (though you may embark from wherever you wish), a Russian visa, and all in-country expenses, including hotels, a full meal plan, transportation within and between cities, English-speaking guides, and all museum and site admissions. The tour, meant for Reed students, parents, faculty, and alumni, will be led by former Reed Russian professor Judson Rosengrant. The deposit and payment deadlines are October 1 and November 1, respectively.
2004-2005
Professor Evgenii Bershtein will spend the summer of 2005 in Helsinki, Finland, as a Kone Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. View the press release here.
Two-week Russian tour, January 6-20, 2005, visiting Moscow and St. Petersburg and their extraordinary museums, performance halls, and historical sites, with overnight trips to the ancient towns of Sergiev, Posad, Suzdal, Vladimir, and Pskov. The cost is $2,818, which includes round-trip airfare from Portland, Russian visa, and all in-country expenses (hotels, meals, transportation within and between cities, English-speaking guides, and museum and site admission). The tour will be led by Russian scholar and former Reed Russian professor Judson Rosengrant and offers an experience of exceptional value for those interested in Russian history and culture. The deadline is October 15, although interested parties are urged to respond without delay, since space is limited.
Judson Rosengrant, PhD
2541 SW Miles Street
Portland, OR 97219-2557
503.892.8499 tel/fax
503.880.9521 mobile
jrosengrant@earthlink.net
topGuest Lecturers
Recent Lectures
Thursday, March 13, 2008 1:10 p.m.
"Dostoevsky’s Idiot: From the Sublime to the Hysterical"
A lecture by Prof. James L. Rice
Location: Eliot 314
Prof. Rice, distinguished scholar of Russian literature and culture, has published on a wide range of topics, and has a particular interest in the psychopathology of Fyodor Dostoevsky. He is the author of Dostoevsky and The Healing Art (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985), Freud’s Russia: National Identity in the Evolution of Psychoanalysis (New Brunswick/London: Transaction, 1993) , and numerous scholarly articles and reviews.
Thursday, March 6, 2008 at 4:30 p.m.
Prof. Karen Evans-Romaine
"On Wings of Song: Romantic Image-Makers in Russian Modernism"
Location: Vollum 110
Professor Karen Evans-Romaine, PhD, Associate Professor of Russian at Ohio University in Athensis, is a specialist in early twentieth-century Russian poetry, particularly the work of Boris Pasternak, German-Russian literary relations, and literature and music. She has a degree in music, piano performance. Other scholar interests include the history of modern Russian culture, European literature and music in the modern era, and the foreign language teaching methodology. She is a co-author of Russian language textbook for the beginners "Golosa".
Tuesday, November, 2007 6 at 7 p.m.
Prof. William Brumfield
"Sacred Vessels: Tower Churches of the Russian North."
Location: Psych 105
William Craft Brumfield, photographer and historian of Russian architecture, has worked in Russia over a period of more than three decades, beginning with the summer of 1970.
In addition to the evening lecture, which is free and open to the public, Prof. Brumfield will offer a seminar on the architecture and culture of Velikii Ustiug at 1:00p.m. in Vollum 120, which is open to Reed students and faculty.
In October of 2007, Benjamin Rifkin, Vice Dean for Undergraduate Affairs and Professor of Russian at College of Liberal Arts, Temple University, presented an Interactive Lecture on Language Learning Strategies at Reed College.
Benjamin Rifkin is a specialist in foreign language pedagogy, foreign language teacher education, applied linguistics, second language acquisition (the acquisition of Russian as a foreign language), and contemporary Russian film. Professor Rifkin is an ACTFL-Certified OPI Trainer in Russian and served as director of the Middlebury Russian School, in 1999–2003, and as president of AATSEEL, in 2003–04.
From March 22nd to April 5th Reed College will host "Russian Days at Reed College," a series of events that will explore Russian culture of the 1920s and 1930s. Art historians, historians, and scholars of literature and cinema will present a variety of lectures. Poet and translator Matvei Yankelevich will read his forthcoming translations of poetry by Daniil Kharms and Alex Vvedensky. A mini-symposium devoted to Yuri Slezkine's new book "The Jewish Century" will also take place. This event will address themes important both to Russian Cultural History and Judaic Studies. For more information, see the press release or contact Evgenii Bershtein (zhenya@reed.edu).
In November of 2004 Mikhail Iampolski, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, presented a lecture entitled "Russia: the Cinema of Anti-Modernity and the Backward Progress". Professor Iampolski is a distinguished scholar of Russian and European culture and film. He has authored The Memory Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film; Language, Body, Chance: Cinema and the Search for Meaning; and Physiology of the Symbolic; in addition to numerous other books and essays.
In November of 2004, Masha Gessen delivered a lecture entitled "How to Be Your Own Censor: The Russian Media in the Times of Putin." Ms. Gessen is the deputy editor in chief of Moscow's weekly city newspaper "Bolshoi gorod" ("The Big City") and a special correspondent for The New Republic. She is the author of the books Ester and Ruzya: How my Grandmother Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace and Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism. Her writing has appeared in numerous magazines including Slate, Lingua Franca, Wired, and others.
On February 13 and 14, 2004, Reed College will host the annual symposium of SOYUZ, a research network for postsocialist studies. The theme of this year's conference is "Memory and the Present in Postsocialist Cultures." The meeting will feature about twenty presentations by scholars from such fields as anthropology, political science, sociology, literary studies, history and art history. All panels, as well as the special event featuring renowned Russian poet and conceptual artist Dmitri Prigov, will be open to students and the general public. For more information, please email Marko Zivkovic (marko.zivkovic@reed.edu) or Evgenii Bershtein (zhenya@reed.edu).
In December of 2003, Laura Engelstein, Henry S. McNeil Professor of History at Yale University, presented a lecture entitled "Art as Icon: The Reception of Aleksandr Ivanov". Professor Engelstein is the author of Moscow, 1905: Working-Class Organization and Political Conflict; The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia; and Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale.
In April of 2003, Dale Pesmen delivered a lecture entitled "Where Do You Start? Why Do You Care? An Anthropologist and Artist Talking About Creativity, Personal Engagement, and Trying to Write Well. Pesmen is the author of the book Russian and Soul: an Exploration.
In March of 2003, Helena Goscilo, Professor of Slavic and Women's Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, presented a lecture entitled "Imagining and Imaging St. Petersburg." Professor Goscila is a specialist in Romanticism, contemporary Russian literature and culture, and Slavic women's writing, and has written many articles and several books, including Fruits of Her Plume: Essays on Contemporary Women's Culture (1993), Lives in Transit (1993), Dehexing Sex: Womanhood Before and After Glasnost (1996), and The Explosive Words of Tatyana Tolstaya's Fiction (1997).
In February of 2003, Dr. Monika Spivak, a literary and cultural historian with The Andrej Bely Museum in Moscow, presented a lecture entitled "The Soviet Union's Search for Genius: The Creation and History of Moscow's Secret Brain Institute."
Reediana Omnibus Musica Philosopha (ROMP), Reed's annual symposium on music and the liberal arts, this year focused on "Music and Terror in Stalinist Russia." The symposium, which took place at the end of January, 2003, featured a film screening and discussion, two panel discussions, and three concerts. For more information, see the ROMP Web site.
In October of 2002 Irina Paperno, Professor of Russian Literature and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Berkeley, presented a lecture entitled "Remembering the Soviet Past: Memoirs from Recent Years."
In the fall semester of 2001, on-leave professor Evgenii Bershtein returned to deliver a lecture on Kharitonov and alum Michael Kunichka, from Slavic Lit and Lang at Berkeley, also visited Reed, presenting "A Window on the Gulag: An Expedition on and Around Stalin's Belomorkanal".
The Yale Professor of Slavic Studies, Katerina Clark, visited in Spring of 2001. Prof. Clark, author of Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution and The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, delivered "Bakhtin's Carnival in its 1930's Context".
Other recent lectures:
"Reading Nabokov Perversely: A Filthy Look at Shakespeare's Lolita" by Eric Naiman, professor of Slavic Literatures and Languages and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley.
"The Frivolous Beard of Ivan the Terrible: The Iconography of Late Eisenstein" by Yuri Tsivian, Professor of Art History, Slavic Literatures and Languages and Cinema/ Media Studies at the University of Chicago.
"Whacked But Not Forgotten: Burying Russia's Mob" by Ol'ga Matich, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Berkeley.
At the Russian House
Visit the Russian House page to see current activities and events.
