Edyta Bojanowska, PhD

Edyta Bojanowska is professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures with a secondary appointment in the Department of History. She specializes in nineteenth-century Russian literature and intellectual history, focusing on questions of empire and nationalism and on the interdisciplinary connections between literature and history. Her first book, Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism (Harvard, 2007), won the Modern Languages Association’s Scaglione Prize for the best book in Slavic studies and was translated into Ukrainian in 2013. The book challenges the Russocentric myth of Gogol, a Ukrainian-born Russophone writer. Her most recent book, A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada (Belknap, 2018), uses a popular Russian travelogue about Africa and Asia as a lens onto global imperial history and the Russian colonial imagination. Currently being translated into Chinese, the book won the award for the Best Book in Literary Scholarship from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) and MacMillan Center’s Gustav Ranis International Book Prize.  Her most recent article, “Was Tolstoy a Colonial Landowner?”, based on original archival research, won the Ab Imperio Award for the Best Article in New Imperial History, and was recently published in Russia. An effort to integrate Russia into accounts of European imperialism bridges these publications with Bojanowska’s current book project, Empire and the Russian Classics (under contract with Harvard University Press), which is a postcolonial rereading of the Russian nineteenth-century literary canon. 

Bojanowska has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard Society of Fellows, the American Council of Learned Societies (in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study), and the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center at the University of Hokkaido, Japan. She currently chairs the MacMillan Center’s European Studies Council.