Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies Department Chair B.A. 1986 Brown University; M.A. in Comparative Literature, 1995 Harvard University Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, 1999 Harvard University
Office Address: 19 University Place, 206 New York, New York (US) 10003 Email:anne.lounsbery@nyu.edu Phone: (212) 998-8674 Areas of Research/Interest Nineteenth-century Russian prose; the rise of print culture; theories of the novel; Russian literature in comparative perspective; imaginary geographies.
External Affiliations Modern Languages Association; American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies; American Studies Association; American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages
Select Publications:
Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in Nineteenth-Century Russia and America. Harvard University press, 2006.
“On Cultivating One’s Own Garden with Other People’s Labor: Serfdom in Tolstoy’s ‘Landowner’s Morning.’” In Before They Were Titans: Early Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, ed. Elizabeth Cheresh Allen, Academic Studies Press, 2015.
“Rossiia i ‘mirovaia literatura’” (“Russia and ‘World Literature’”). In Voprosy Literatury, 2014. Chinese translation in Forum for World Literature Studies, Wuhan, China, 2015.“
‘The World on the Back of a Fish’: Mobility, Immobility and Economics in Oblomov.” Russian Review, January 2011.“Print Culture and Real Life in Dostoevsky’s Demons.” Dostoevsky Studies XI, 2007.
“‘No, this is not the provinces!’: Provincialism, Authenticity and Russianness in Dead Souls.” Russian Review, April 2005.
“‘Bound by Blood to the Race’: Pushkin in African American Context.” Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness. Ed. Nicole Svobodny, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, and Ludmilla A. Trigos; intro. H. L. Gates. Northwestern University Press, 2006.
On May 25, 2022, six scholars—all primarily Russia specialists—responded to the question of how scholarship on nineteenth-century Russian culture would change in response to Russia’s war on Ukraine. The present grouping of thought pieces, written by five of our six original participants, grew out of the online event. We are grateful to Ab Imperio for bringing these informal mini-essays to a wider audience in such a timely way, and we hope the articles will help advance our field’s urgent discussion of how best to move forward.
As we approach the one-year mark of 19v’s inception, I’ve been polling some of our participants to learn which of our activities have proven valuable so far and what we might want to undertake in the future.
Please join us on Zoom Wednesday, June 24, 12-2 pm EST, for an interdisciplinary roundtable on “What Is The 19th Century?” with panelists Alex Martin (University of Notre Dame), Rosalind Polly Blakesley (Cambridge), and Luba Golburt (Berkeley). The panel will be moderated by Sara Dickinson (Università di Genova). Please also mark your calendars for these upcoming 19v Seminars, always held on Wednesdays.
Dostoevsky + 11 time zones: it’s why Russian studies is never going away. Or at least that’s what I was taught in graduate school—and indeed the brilliant cultural production of the nineteenth century has long drawn students and scholars to the Russia field. But as the literature of this period grows more distant from our own moment (is the nineteenth century the new eighteenth century?), we encounter both framing challenges and intellectual opportunities. What does nineteenth-century culture mean for us today?
This week, All the Russias is delighted to feature excerpts from Anne Lounsbery’s “Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917,” just out from Cornell Press. The below segment derives from Chapter 8, “Melnikov and Leskov, or, What is Regionalism in Russia?”
This week, All the Russias is delighted to feature excerpts from Anne Lounsbery’s “Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917,” just out from Cornell Press. The below segment derives from the book’s introduction, titled “Geography, History, Trope: Facts on the Ground.”
Chekhov’s stories model a certain way of being in the world. One might describe them as incorrigibly humanist, humanist in the most uncool sense. You can choose to interpret Chekhov in ways that make his texts more difficult than they really are, especially if you subscribe to the Modernist tenet that high art is all about difficulty. But I think if you do so you’re failing to experience what’s best and most important about the stories, which is simply their call to look humbly for truth, to attend carefully to ordinary life, and to practice ordinary human empathy. The prescriptions here are almost embarrassingly simple—but they are not at all easy.
