• Royce Fellowship
Elizabeth
Stern

Concentration 

Comparative Literature/Slavic Studies

Award Year 

2007

Ballet was at the center of Russia’s modernist movement during the first part of the 20th century in St Petersburg. Elizabeth's project examined the works of two St.Petersburg ballet critics, Aleksandr Benois and Akim Volynsky, and their significance to the development of Russian ballet. Both critics stood as relatively conservative figures who called for the revitalization of ballet by looking to its classical past. Their critical language fuses the secular philosophy of the West to Russia’s strong spiritual tradition, transforming ballet into a kind of religious experience capable of saving Russia from the excesses (artistic and political) of modernism.

Elizabeth received a Fulbright to study Art History in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2008. In 2011 she completed a M.Phil. program in Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford University. She is currently a Ph.D. student at Princeton in Slavic Studies.