Edyta Bojanowska

On leave in Spring and Fall 2025.

No office hours Spring and Fall 2025 (on leave)

Education:

Ph.D. Harvard University, Slavic Languages and Literature
 B.A. Barnard College, English and Russian

Interests:

19th century Russian literature and intellectual history, empire and nation in Russian culture, postcolonial and settler colonial studies, history of globalization, ideology, travel writing, journalism and serialization, intertextuality, reception studies, theories of the spatial turn, Central European literatures, especially Polish

Publications:

Books:

A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada (Belknap Press, imprint of Harvard University Press, 2018).  A study of Ivan Goncharov’s travelogue about Africa and Asia, The Frigate Pallada (1858) in the context of global imperial history. Russian and Chinese translations are forthcoming.

• The Best Book in Literary Scholarship, AATSEEL (2019)
• The Gustav Ranis International Book Prize, MacMillan Center, Yale University (2019)
• The University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies (Honorable Mention, 2019)
• The Barbara Heldt Prize from the Association of Women in Slavic Studies (Honorable Mention, 2019)

Interviews about A World of Empires appeared in Yale News, The MacMillan Report, and to Sean’s Russia Blog Podcast

Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism (Harvard Univ. Press, 2007).

• Awarded MLA’s Scaglione Prize for the best Book in Slavic Studies (2009). 

“Mykola Gogol”: Myzh ukrains’kym i rosiis’kym natsionalizmom (Kyiv: Tempora, 2013). The Ukrainian translation of Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism. 

Articles:

“Was Tolstoy a Colonial Landlord?  The Dilemmas of Private Property and Settler Colonialism on the Bashkir Steppe,” Slavic Review 81.2 (2022):324-348.

• Awarded the 2022 Ab Imperio Award for the Best Study in New Imperial History
• Republished in Russian translation by Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, in a discussion forum

“Empire and the Russian Novel in the Long Nineteenth Century” in The Oxford Handbook of the Russian  Novel, ed. Julie Buckler and Justin Weir (Oxford Univ. Press, 2022), forthcoming.

“Sakhalin Island,” in Chekhov in Context, Yuri Corrigan, ed. (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2023), 92-98.

“Race-ing the Russian Nineteenth Century,” Slavic Review 80.2 (2021): 258-266.

“Pushkin’s ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’: The Slavic Question, Imperial Anxieties, and Geopolitics,” Pushkin Review 21 (2019): 11-33.

“A Ticket to Europe: Collections of Ukrainian Folk Songs and Their Russian Reviewers, 1820s-1830s,” Ukraine and Europe: Cultural Alternatives, Encounters, and Negotiations, Giovanna Brogi Bercoff, Marko Pavlyshyn, Serhii Plokhii, eds., University of Toronto Press (2017), 226-248.

“Writing the Russian Reader into the Text: Gogol, Turgenev, and their Audiences,” Reading in Russia.  Practices of Reading and Literary Communication, 1760-1930, Damiano Rebecchini and Raffaella Vassena, eds. (Milan: Di/Segni, 2014), 129-142. 

 “Chekhov’s The Duel, or How to Colonize Responsibly,” Chekhov for the 21st Century, Carol Apollonio and Angela Brintlinger, eds., (Bloomington: Slavica, 2012) 31-48.

“Empire by Consent: Dostoevsky, and the Polish Uprising of 1863,” Slavic Review 71.1 (2012): 1-24.

“Nikolai Gogol, 1809-1852” in Stephen Norris and Willard Sunderland, eds., Russia’s People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2012) 159-167.

“Equivocal Praise and National-Imperial Conundrums: Gogol’s ‘A Few Words About Pushkin,’” Canadian Slavonic Papers (an anniversary volume on Gogol), 51.2-3 (2009): 173-196.

“E Pluribus Unum: Isaac Babel’s ‘Red Cavalry’ As a Story Cycle,” Russian Review 59 (2000): 371-89.

“Wislawa Szymborska: Naturalist and Humanist,” Slavic and East European Journal 41 (1997): 199-223. Reprints: Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 190. Detroit: Gale Research Co., August, 2004; and in Poetry for Students, vol. 27. Detroit: Gale Research Co., November, 2007.

Rev. of Blood of Others: Stalin’s Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity, by Rory Finnin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022), Slavic Review 82.3 (2023): 848-849.

Review of From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Russian Nation through Cultural Mythology, 1855-1870 by Olga Maiorova (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2010), The Russian Review 70.3 (2011): 519-520.

Selected Honors/Awards:

National Humanities Center Fellowship (Spring 2025)

Ab Imperio Award for the Best Study in New Imperial History (peer-reviewed article category) for “Was Tolstoy a Colonial Landlord?,” 2022

Foreign Visitor Fellowship, Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, University of Hokkaido, Japan, 2022

Guggenheim Fellowship, 2020-2021

The Best Book in Literary Scholarship, AATSEEL (2019), awarded for A World of Empires (Belknap Press, 2018)

The Gustav Ranis International Book Prize, MacMillan Center, Yale University, 2019

ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars, in residence at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies, 2013-2014

The Rutgers Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence, 2012

Rutgers University SAS Award for Distinguished Contribution to Undergraduate Education, 2012

MLA Scaglione Prize for the Best Book in Slavic Studies, 2007-2008, awarded for Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism (Harvard Univ. Press, 2007)

Harvard University Society of Fellows, 2003-2006

Professional Activities:

Member of the Editorial Board of the journal Ab Imperio.

Member of the PMLA Advisory Committee, 2016-2019

Member of the Editorial Board of “Russian Shorts,” a Bloomsbury Press series

Member of the Modern Languages Association’s Executive Committee of the Slavic and East European Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Forum, 2015-2020

Courses Taught at Yale:

Tolstoy’s War and Peace (undergraduate)

Russia Between Empire and Nation (undergraduate)

Love and Death in the Russian Short Story (undergraduate)

Strange Russian Writers (First-year seminar)

The Russian Nineteenth Century, Remediated and Reimagined (graduate)

Space and Place in Modern Theory and Fiction (graduate)

Chekhov (graduate)

Empire in Russian Culture (graduate)