Scholarly Publications & Papers

Published Books

 EccentriCities: Writing in the Margins of Modernism, St. Petersburg to Rio de Janeiro. Manchester University Press, 2013. 444 pages, 40 b&w maps & illustrations, index.

Book projects in process:

  • New Navigators: ReVisionary Artists and Writers, Remapping Cultural Memory and Reorienting Cultural Discourse across Lusophone Cultures. Manuscript in early stages of development. (multiple related publications and presentations listed below)
  • Drift (Poems)
  • Migrations ( sketches, sculptural works, and photographs, essays)
  • Paris Palimpsest: Reading between Lines of Astonished Memory, Writing on the Walls & Execution of the Writer. Manuscript in advanced stages.

Essays on Art / Intersections within Visual and Verbal Arts:

Essays on Film:

  • Lotman’s World/Lotmani maailm, Adne Nelk, review essay, Film and History, 43:1 (2013) 95-99.
  • (Re)visionary Reflections: Khrzhanovsky’s A Room & a Half and Nelk’s Lotman’s World”/“Animated Film in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union,” Modern Language Association (MLA), Boston, Jan. 2013.
  • “Transnational Cinema: Relocation, Re-casting, Reimag(in)ing of Cultural Memory,” seminar organizer & chair, American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Harvard Un, Cambridge, March 2009.
  • “Post-exilic Returns & Post-modern Revisions of E. Europe: Kieslowski, Akerman, Kogut,” ACLA, 2009.
  • “Chantal Akerman’s Cinematic Transgressions: Transhistorical and Transcultural Transpositions, Translingualism, and the Transgendering of the Cinematic ” Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Post World War II Cinema. Ed. Marcelline Block. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.

Essays on Literature: 

  • Textual Cartographies: Relocations & Reorientations of Cultural Consciousness & Conscience in Postcolonial novels by Lídia Jorge & José Eduardo Agualusa”, Spaces & Routes: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Literature & Cartography /Espaços e rotas: abordagens interdisciplinares entre literatura e cartografia, Centro de Estudos Comparatistas, Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa, 6-7 June 2024.
  • “Revisionary Imag(in)ing of Scarred and Stigmatized Bodies: Reconfigurations of Luso-Angolan Cultural Memory in Works by Agualusa and Miranda,” in “Literary and Cultural Representations of Stigma” organized by the American Portuguese Studies Association (APSA), for the Modern Language Association (MLA), Seattle, WA, January 2020.
  • “Refusados, Revoltados, Retornados, Refugiados Relembrados: Reconfigurations of Cultural Memory by Lusophone Authors & Artists,” Lusophone Studies Association, Univ. of Évora, Portugal, June 2019.
  • “The ‘Extreme Edge’ of Comparative Inquiry—from Lotman to Lins,” 21st World Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA/AILC), University of Vienna, Austria, July 2016.
  • “Reimag(in)ing Story & History, Documentary & Fiction: (Re)visionary Images in Contemporary Novels.”  Dedalus: Revista Portuguesa de Literatura Comparada 17, 2014.
  • “Recasting Authorship and Authority: Refractory Writers in Reflexive Russian and Lusophone Works,” atelier: “Raconter la théorie dans le roman,” ICLA/AILC, Sorbonne, Paris, July 2013.
  • “Re-routing Cultural Memory in the Paris Metro,” seminar on “Mapping the City: Minority Narratives and the Multiethnic Metropolis,” ACLA, Toronto, April 2013.
  • “Recasting the Republic Past/Present: Liudmila Ulitskaia & Lídia Jorge,” Iberoslavica, 2012; Portuguese version, Letras com Vida 4, 2012. Paper presented at COMPARES: 4th Intnt’l Conference of Iberian & Slavonic Cultures in Contact & Comparison: ResPublica(s), Un of Lisbon, May 2010.
  • Invited discussant, “(Wo)manning the Can(n)on: Creation, Procreation, and Destruction,” Association for the Study of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), Washington, DC, November 2011.
  • “Tightropes: Transcultural Renegotiations of Portuguese Cultural Identity in Contemporary Literature,” upcoming presentation at the 7th International Conference of the American Portuguese Studies Association (APSA): Trans-Atlantic Exchanges, Brown University, October 2011.
  • “Estar é Ser: Pessoa, Place, & Plural Authorsh” Invited response to Richard Zenith. Whose Words: Alternate Theories of Authorship in Portuguese and American Poetry in the 20th Century. Univ. of Lisbon, May 2010.
  • “Transnational Reconfigurations of Cultural Memory in Contemporary American Literature,” Encontros do Instituto de Cultura Americana, Un of Lisbon, March 2010.
  • “Dissent, Despair, & the Limits of Dialogue & Dialogism in Dos Passos’ Urban/e U.S.A.,” III Symposium John Dos Passos: Modernity and Intercultural Dialogues, Madeira, January (forthcoming in a collection of essays to be published by the Centro Cultural John Dos Passos).
  • “Postmodern Portuguese and Russian Re-Mappings of Cultural Memory: Intertextual, Transhistorical, Transcultural Dialogue,” Cumplicidades Comparatistas: Origens, Influencias, Resistencias/VI Congresso Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Literatura Comparada, December 2008.
  • “Navigating Past/Present: Modes of Mapping Cultural Memory in Contemporary Russian and Luso-Brazilian Literature”/“Kартографические дислокации культурной памяти в современной русской, португальской, и бразильской литературе,” American Contributions to the 14th International Congress of Slavists, Ohrid, 2008. 2: Literature. Ed. David Bethea. Bloomington: Slavica, 2008. 1-24.
  • “Unorthodox Confession, Orthodox Conscience: Aesthetic Authority in the Underground,” Studies in East European Thought: Dostoevsky’s Significance for Philosophy and Theology, ed. R. Bird, 59: 1-2 (June 2007) 65-85.
  • “Petrushevskaia and Ulitskaia: The Refusal of Nostalgia and Rewriting of History in Contemporary Russian Women’s Writing,” Modern Language Association (MLA), Chicago, December 2007.
  • “EccentriCities: Writing in the Margins of Modern St. Petersburg’s and Rio de Janeiro’s Scribblers,” International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), Rio de Janeiro, July 2007.
  • “The Deterritorialization of Underground Discour” International Dostoevsky Soc., Budapest, Aug. 2007.
  • “The Wandering Portico: Classical Structures in Transnational Russian Fiction & Film—Brodsky, Tarkovsky, Makine, Ulitskaya,” AATSEEL, 2006.
  • “Makine’s Testament: Transnationalism, Translation, and the Transformation of the Novel,” Review of Literatures of the European Union, Traduzione Tradizione? Paths in the European Polysystem, 4 (July 2006) 167-
  • Hero, History, and Story” Panel Chair, AATSEEL, December 2006.
  • “Metamorphosis across Cultural Margins: Translation, Transculturation, and the Transformation of Critical Discourse and Literary Form,” seminar organizer & chair, ACLA, Princeton University, March 2
  • “Pathological Consciousness, Parasitic Prose, and the Metamorphosis of Narrative Fiction: From Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Machado de Assis to Lispector, Verrissimo, & Pelevin,” ACLA,
  • “Mapping Petersburg, 1900–1920: Literary Publications: SIRIN and the Symbolist Press.” AATSEEL, Washington, DC, December
  • “Laughter in Dostoevsky’s Early Fiction” MLA, Washington, DC, December 2005.
  • “Four Short Takes: Brodsky, Tarkovsky, Pelevin, and Sokurov on Translation, Transposition, and Cultural Memoir” Conference of the American Association of Slavic Studies (AAASS), Salt Lake City, November 2005.
  • “Hallucinated Cities on the Margins of European Modernism: from Bely’s Petersburg to Mário de Andrade’s São Paulo.” ACLA, Penn State, March 2005.
  • “Eccentric Consciousness in Exile: Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia,” AATSEEL, Philadelphia, 2004.
  • “Writing in the Margins: Lispector and Petrushevskaia, Lins and Pelevin,” Slavic Colloquium, University of Pennsylvania, November 2004.
  • “Writing in the Madhouse of Brazilian and Russian Literature: Lins and Pelevin,” APSA, Un of Maryland, October 2004.
  • “From the Grotesque to the Sublime: Logos and the Purgatorial Landscape of Mertvie dushi and Master i Margarita,” Slavic and East European Journal, 47: 1 (Spring 2003) 45-
  • “Underground Pessoa: Dialogues with Dostoevsky in Modern Luso-Brazilian Literature,” XIIth International Dostoevsky Society Symposium, Geneva, Switzerland, September 2003.
  • “Reflection/Refraction of the Dying Light: Narrative Vision in Nineteenth-century Russian and French Fiction,”Comparative Literature, 54: 1 (winter 2002) 2-22.
  • “EccentriCities: Disease, Dissent, and Dialogue in the ‘Petersburg Text,” SEEJ panel, “Disease in Slavic Literatures,” MLA, San Diego, December 2002.
  • Organizer and Chair of a Special Session: “Memory and Madness in the Eccentric Citytext: The Poetics of Petersburg, Rio and Prague,” MLA, New York, December 2002.
  • “The Urban(e) Structure of Narrative Consciousness: Petersburg and Rio as Schizophrenic Subtexts in Fictions by Gogol and Machado de Assis,” MLA, New York, December 2002.
  • “Petrushevskaia’s Vremia Noch’: Moscow Underground,” AATSEEL, New York, December 2002.
  • “Schizophrenia and the Petersburg Text,” AATSEEL, December 2001.
  • “Andreï Makine’s Testament: Re-membering the Novel,” annual conference of the Southern Comparative Literature Association (SCLA), Un of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, September 2001.
  • “The Refractive Gaze Facing Death: Fantastical Visions in Russian and French Realist Fiction,” Conference on Slavic Literature, Yale University, New Haven, CT, February 2001.
  • “Verbal Regeneration in Gogol’s Mertvie dushi & Bulgakov’s Master i Margarita,” Mid-At AAASS, 2000.
  • “Liminal Laughter in Tolstoy’s Fictions,” AATSEEL, Chicago, December 2000.
  • “The Poetics of Infernal Circling in Blok’s Vozmezdie, Echoes of Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale,” AATSEEL, San Francisco, December 2000.
  • “Generic Digressions in Gogol’s Revisor,” Princeton University, May 1998.
  • “The Play of Light and Shadow in Tatiana Tolstaia’s Milaia Shura,” Princeton University, 1997.• “Dispossessed Sons and Displaced Meaning in Faulkner’s Modern Cosmos,” Mississippi Quarterly, 50: 3 (Summer 1997) 427-443.

Reviews of scholarly literature:

  • Val Vinokur’s The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas, Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, 52: 3-4 (Sept. 2010).
  • Sarah Young’s Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and the Ethical Foundations of Narrative: Reading, Narrating, Scripting. Slavic and East European Journal, 51: 1 (2007) 151-153.
  • Julian Graffy’s Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” Slavic and East European Journal, 46: 2 (Summer 2002) 392-
  • Françoise Genevray’s George Sand et ses contemporains russes, Revue Canadienne de Littérature, 30 (2003).
  • Michel Aucouturier’s Le Realisme socialiste, Slavic and East European Journal, 44 : 1 (Spring 2000) 140-

Published translations:

  • Natalie Ferrand, “Toward a Database of Novelistic Topoi,” The Novel: Volume 2: Forms and Themes, ed. Franco Moretti, Princeton University Press, 324-45.
  • Luiz Costa Lima, “The Novel and the Control of the Imagination,” The Novel: Volume 1. 37-68.
  • José Luiz Passos, “Macunaíma,” in The Novel: Volume 2. 896-905.
  • Roberto Schwarz, “Machado’s Turnabout: Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas,” in The Novel: Volume 1. 816-840.
  • Sylvie Thorel Cailleteau, “La poésie de la médiocrité” and “Vénus décomposée, lecture de Nana,” in The Novel: Volume 2. 64-94, 541-547.