Summer in Krakow Faculty

Svetlana Evdokimova

Svetlana Evdokimova is Professor of Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature at Brown University. She is currently Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages. A specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature, Evdokimova holds degrees from Yale University (Ph.D. Slavic Languages and Literatures) and the St. Petersburg State University, Russia (M.A. French Language and Literature). Her main areas of scholarly interest include, Pushkin, Russian and European Romanticism, Tolstoy, Chekhov, relations between fiction and history, and gender and sexuality in Russian and European literatures. She is the author of Pushkin's Historical Imagination (Yale University Press, 1999) and editor of Alexander Pushkin's "Little Tragedies": The Poetics of Brevity (Wisconsin University Press, 2004), which was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2004 by Choice. In addition, she has published a wide range of articles on Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, and Tolstoy. She is currently completing a book, A Genius of Culture: The Chekhov Phenomenon, which examines Chekhov's relationship with the Russian intelligentsia and its impact on the formation of his literary self.

Michal Oklot

Michal Oklot holds his M. A. from University in Warsaw (Poland)—where he also taught at the Department of Philosophy and Sociology—and his Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Northwestern University.

At Northwestern University, he also organized a summer program at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland for Northwestern students, where he taught a course on Polish literature and culture, and was the on-site program coordinator. Prior to coming to Brown he taught at University of Wisconsin-Madison and American University in Cairo. He has taught courses on Russian, Polish, and English literatures from the early modern period through the twentieth-century.

His scholarly interests include Nikolai Gogol and his twentieth century continuators, Russian and Polish modernism, comparative Slavic history of ideas, especially Neoplatonic currents in Slavic thought, literary theory. He has published articles on Schulz, Gombrowicz, Wittlin, Vincenz, and others. His book, Phantasms of Matter in Gogol (and Gombrowicz), is forthcoming with Dalkey Archive Press, in January 2009. Currently he is working on a book on Nabokov’s aesthetics.