Matthew Walker

Lecturer

Office Hours: TBA

E-mail address: mwalke@sas.upenn.edu

Biography

Matthew Walker completed a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures (with a minor in Critical Theory) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010. His dissertation, “Reading Events: Alexander Pushkin & Nikolai Gogol in Russian Literary Criticism,” employs the differing valencies of three terms for “event” in Russian—sobytie, proisshestvie, and sluchai—in order to reexamine two critical “events” in Russian literary history: first, the reception of one of Pushkin’s most famous poems, “Prorok” (Prophet) and second, the shift in Gogol criticism at the turn of the century away from Realism toward a “Modernist” Gogol. Among other projects, he is currently at work developing the part of his dissertation devoted to Gogol into a book to be entitled Gogol’s Ghosts: Essays on Nikolai Gogol and Russian Literary Criticism, as well as co-translating (with Michal Oklot) an anthology of critical writings on Gogol by the Silver Age critic Vasily Rozanov.

His main research interests are nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature and the history of aesthetics and literary criticism in Russia and Europe.

Last updated on April 15, 2010