09/08/2020
Please join us on Thursday, September 17th, at 4 PM CST on Zoom for our first REEEC New Directions Lecture of the academic year. Emily Wang (Assistant Professor of Russian, University of Notre Dame) and Korey Garibaldi (Assistant Professor of American Studies, University of Notre Dame) will give a lecture entitled "Interrogating the Declining Significance of Pushkin's Blackness: Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, and Literary Nationalism". Though most scholarship on Pushkin’s reception in the United States focuses on twentieth-century African American literature, the origins of this encounter remain poorly understood. In fact, nineteenth-century commentators on both sides of the Atlantic were obsessed with Pushkin’s racial heritage—as both a Russian, and as a canonical European writer of African descent. This collaborative lecture (presented by a transatlantic historian of race and a Slavist) brings together little-remembered newspaper records, personal correspondence, and others texts—from the mid-1830s onwards—to recover how Pushkin was regarded as a black intellectual. For Zoom meeting information, please register at https://go.illinois.edu/wang-garibaldi-lecture
