Join us for our first in-person event since February 2020 to celebrate the achievements of our students and faculty over the past two years! With masks still required, we are excited to be back and looking forward seeing familiar faces and welcoming new ones to our series.
PARTICIPATING STUDENTS:
Nicole Gonik is a Macaulay Honors student at Hunter College, double-majoring in Russian Language & Culture and Political Science, and minoring in International Relations. She is interested in studying the ways in which Russian literature and culture interact with politics, and hopes to pursue a PhD in Russian Studies. Project: "Borders in Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time and 'The Demon'.”
Nissan Mushiev is a registered nurse completing his Bachelor’s degree, with hopes of working in the emergency room. His project is a play based on two Russian novels, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Sofia Petrovna by Lydia Chukovskaya, both set during Stalin’s terror. In the play, the two visions and ideologies clash during the short encounter between the eponymous characters. Project: "Familiar Faces."
Mecaria Baker is a Comparative Literature major, graduating in Spring 2022. She is interested in the representations of distance and space through literary chronography and deictic relationships, the exile experience and immigrant narrative, linguistic socialization in New York City. She is fascinated by thresholds and absolutely entertained by the dash. Project: "Marina Tsvetaeva's Dash: 'Readers of Newspapers'"
Daniella Drakhler has lived with cats all her life. Her play OMI is inspired by her fur friends, as well as by Chekhov's The Three Sisters and Vampilov's Duck Hunting. "During March and April of 2020 my mom 'exiled' me to my boyfriend’s dacha in the Catskills, while she ended up with Covid-19. The grueling unrest of that condition along with scary uncertainty in the new pandemic reality, and the later cathartic flattening of the NYC curve along with my mom’s recuperation, all got reflected in the little piece where the narrative comes from those who become the most vulnerable in times of the human crisis. Project: OMI (One Act Play)
PARTICIPATING FACULTY:
Born in Riga, Latvia, Nadya L. Peterson was educated in Moscow, Russia and received her Ph.D. in Russian literature from Indiana University. She is an Associate Professor of Russian at Hunter College of the City University of New York and the Head of the Russian and Slavic Studies Program at Hunter. Peterson is also on the faculty of the doctoral program in the Department of Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a specialist on contemporary Russian prose, women’s literature, Russian education and Anton Chekhov. She is a published translator and editor.
Three-times winner of New Jersey Fellowships in Arts, Professor Emeritus at Hunter College in NYC, Emil Draitserhas authored twelve books of scholarly and artistic prose, such as In the Jaws of the Crocodile: A Soviet Memoir; Farewell, Mama Odessa: A Novel; Stalin’s Romeo Spy, and Making War, Not Love: Gender and Sexuality in Russian Humor. His work also appeared in the Partisan Review, World Literature Today, Prism International, and elsewhere.
Yasha Klots is an assistant professor of Russian at Hunter College, where he teaches a variety of courses on Russian literature and culture and curates the "Russian and East European Cultures at Hunter" series. He also teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center and is directing Tamizdat Project, a public scholarship initiative devoted to the circulation, first publications, and reception of "contraband" Russian literature abroad. His most recent book project is Poets in New York: On City, Language, Diaspora (Moscow, 2016). His monograph Tamizdat, the Gulag, and Contraband Russian Literature is forthcoming in 2023.