Russell Scott Valentino, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair
Before moving to Indiana to take up the position of department chair of Slavic in January of 2013, I was professor of cinema and comparative literature at the University of Iowa, where, in addition to general literature and culture courses, I also taught literary translation in the Translation Workshop, and served as Editor-in-Chief of The Iowa Review. My first book was the scholarly monograph Vicissitudes of Genre in the Russian Novel (2001); my second, currently under review, is From Virtue to Virtuality: Property, Commerce and the Quest for Masculine Character from Dostoevsky to DeLillo. I have also translated eight book-length literary works from Italian, Croatian, and Russian, including Fulvio Tomizza's Materada (2000), Carlo Michelstaedter's Persuasion and Rhetoric (2005), Sabit Madaliev's The Silence of the Sufi (2006), and Predrag Matvejevic's The Other Venice (2007). My essays and translations have appeared in Words Without Borders, Slavic Review, Defunct, The Iowa Review, Two Lines, POROI, Circumference, Asia, The Del Sol Review, Russian Review, 91st Meridian, Modern Fiction Studies, and 91st Meridian. I have received two Fulbright-Hays research grants and two NEA literature fellowships (one for prose and one for poetry). I am also the founder and editor-in-chief of the non-profit independent press Autumn Hill Books, an independent press that focuses on literary translations of prose and poetry into English.
Degree: Ph.D in Slavic Languages and Literatures, UCLA, 1993.
Dissertation: “The Rise of the Russian Tendentious Novel: Generic Hybridization and Literary Change”
Specialties/Research Interests: literary translation and translation studies; world literature; 19th-20th century Russian literature; Mediterranean studies; virtue theory; republicanism; modernity
Courses taught:
Major Texts of World Literature; Translation Workshop; Intro to Russian Culture; Two Books and Four Movies: Zhivago and Lolita in print and film; Honors seminar on War and Peace;
Selected Publications
- The Oxymoron of Empathic Criticism
- Teaching in Translation
- Translation and Proficiency Language Teaching
- Translation and the Teaching of Literature
- A Translator's Dilemma
- Crossing
- Crossing 2
- Crossing 3
- Crossed
- On Three Cultures
- Lenin's Empty Place
- Pierre Menard's Alexander Blok
Office number: BH 503
E-mail address: russellv@indiana.edu
Mailing address:
Russell Valentino
Indiana University
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
1020 E. Kirkwood Avenue
Ballantine Hall 502
Bloomington, IN 47405-7103
