Harriet Murav is Professor of Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois. She is the author of Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels & the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford University Press, 1992), Russia's Legal Fictions (University of Michigan Press, 1998), and Identity Theft: The Jew in Imperial Russia and the Case of Avraam Uri Kovner (Stanford University Press, 2003). Murav has co-edited Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky's Ethnographic Expedition with Eugene Avrutin and St. Petersburg Judaica (Brandeis University Press, 2009) and is about to publish (again with Avrutin) Jews in the East European Borderlands: Essays in Honor of John Klier (Academic Studies Press). In addition, she is the editor of a book series exploring new approaches to Russian-Jewish Studies, "Borderlines: Russian and East-European Jewish Studies," at Academic Studies Press. Murav’s latest book is Music From a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolutionary Russia (Stanford University Press, 2011), for which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and from which her lecture is derived. The book is a study of Russian and Yiddish literary works from the 1920s through the turn of the 21st century, with particular emphasis on the themes of the body, language, translation, mourning, and memory in Isaac Babel, Dovid Bergelson, Perets Markish, Rivke Rubin, Vasilii Grossman, Felix Roziner, Fridrikh Gorenshtein, Dina Rubina, Alexandr Melikhov, and other writers.
Location: Music Room, Levis Faculty Center, 919 W. Illinois St., Urbana
Date: Monday, January 23, 2012, 7:00 pm