
Instructional Professor
Foster 411
773.702.0046
Ph.D., Northwestern University, 2005
Teaching at UChicago since 2006
Research Interests:
National identity, gender, magic realism, folklore, emigration, narrative theory
Biography
My general interests include performativity, representation, and identity; the ethics of art, the political dimension of esthetic experience. Most specifically, I am interested in the role of trauma and sublimity in the emotional power of national or other identities.
Work with Students
I have advised thesis and research projects on Southeastern Europe- from national identity history narratives and self-representations in political writings to representations of gender performance in literature, creative performance project based on folklore, to comparative analysis of narrative plotting of death in magic realist writings.
Publications
- "Identity Narratives Unraveled: the Bulgarian Film Mission London,” Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, ed. American Contributions to the 16th International Congress of Slavists, Belgrade, 2018. v. 2; Literature. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, (2018): 103-119.
- “Returning the Gaze in Milcho Manchevski’s Before the Rain,” Balkanistica 29 (2016): 99-121.
Recent Courses
- Strangers to Ourselves: Émigré Literature and Film
- States of Surveillance
- The Shadows of Living Things: The Writings of Mikhail Bulgakov
- The Burden of History: The Nation and Its Lost Paradise
- Balkan Folklore
- Imaginary Worlds: the Fantastic and Magic Realism in Russia and South Eastern Europe
- Returning the Gaze: the Balkans, the West, and the Rest
- Poetics of Gender in the Balkans: Wounded Men, Sworn Virgins, Eternal Mothers
- The Brighter Side of the Balkans: Humor and Satire in Literature and Film
- Nation and Narration in Southeastern Europe
- All levels of Bulgarian Language