Dr. Edith W. Clowes


Edith Clowes
  • Professor Emerita (ret. 2012)

Contact Info


Education —

Ph.D. in Slavic, Yale University, 1981, New Haven, Connecticut
M.A. in Slavic, Yale University, 1977
B.A. in Russian, Oberlin College, 1973, Oberlin, Ohio

Research —

Research interests:

  • Intersections between literature and philosophy
  • Intellectual history
  • Comparative literature (especially German and Russian)
  • Literary and cultural theory

Teaching —

Teaching interests:

  • Late 19th- and 20th-c. Russian literature and culture
  • Post-Soviet literature and culture
  • Beginning Czech
  • Introduction to Czech culture
  • Literature and Totalitarianism in Central Europe

Selected Publications —

2011 book: Russia on the Edge. Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity Cornell University Press.

2011 article: "Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and the Orthodox Legacy in Stalin’s Time," Rossiia i zapad (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2011), 207-225.

2010 encyclopedia article: "Russia (20th Century)." The Encyclopedia of the Novel. Ed. Peter Melville Logan (ed). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2010, vol. 2, 716-726.

2010 article: "Looking for Miracles: Akhmatova, Pasternak, and the Orthodox Legacy," Modern Greek Studies (U. Minnesota), volumes 26-27, 2010-2011, 1-23.

2008 Introduction to forum: "Gorky and Godbuilding," Modern Greek Studies (U. Minnesota), volumes 24-25, 2008-2009, 1-9.

2008 article: "Russia’s Deconstructionist Westernizer: Mikhail Ryklin between Moscow and Berlin," Landshaft (web-based journal, 1 (Winter, 2008), 17 pp.

2007 book chapter: "Groundlessness: Nietzsche and Russian Concepts of Tragic Philosophy." Nietzsche and the Rebirth of the Tragic. Edited M. A. Frese. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 126—137.

2007 book chapter: "Traditsiia "Vekh" v pozdnee sovetskoe vremia." Sbornik statei "Iz-pod glyb" A. I. Solzhenitsyna i esse G. S. Pomerantsa," Sbornik "Vekhi" v kontekste russkoi kul"tury. Moscow: Nauka, 264—271.

Grants & Other Funded Activity —

External: ACLS, NEH Summer, NEH Fellowship for University Teachers, NEH Conference Grant, DAAD, IREX, Fulbright-Hays, Kennan Short-Term, ITT

Internal: Hall Center for the Humanities, GRF Summer Research