Beth Holmgren
Professor

Director of Graduate Studies

Areas of expertise:
Russian literature and culture (19th and 20th centuries), Polish literature and culture (19th and 20th centuries), literature and the market, women’s writing and performance, Slavic emigre culture.

Current projects:

My current book project, On Tour with Madame Modjeska: Polish Actress, American Star (under contract with Indiana University Press), analyzes the binational career and legacy of Helena Modrzejewsha (1840-1909), who became the greatest actress of the nineteenth-century Polish stage, emigrated to the United States in 1876, and re-established herself as an English-speaking star in American until her retirement in 1907.

This year I am serving as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, the leading private organization in the United States dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about the former Soviet Union (including Eurasia) and Eastern and Central Europe.  For more information about AAASS-its annual convention, activities, and publications, see http://www.fas. harvard.edu/~aaass/. In conjunction with my duties as AAASS president this year, I am writing and producing a documentary with filmmaker Igor' Sopronenko on the last two decades of Russian women's activism, Twenty Years Forward? The Contents and Discontents of Modern Russian Feminism.  This film will be premiered at the AAASS national convention in November 2008 and at Duke in early 2009.

Recent and representative publications:
"The Unnatural School of Panaeva's The Tal'nikov Family." Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (The New Literary Review, Moscow). Forthcoming.

"Settling for the Real Hollywood: Russians in Studio-Era American Film," in American Artists from the Russian Empire (Bethesda, MD: Foundation for International Arts and Education, 2008).  Exhibit catalogue and anthology for touring FIAE exhibit in 2008-2009.

"Fiction and the Acting Life: The Memoir of Helena Modjeska," in Real Stories, Imagined Realities: Fictionality and Non-fictionality in Literary Constructs and Historical Contexts, ed. Markku Lehtimaki, Simo Leisti, & Marja Rytkonen (Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press, 2007): 343-57.

"The Blue Angel and Blackface: Redeeming Entertainment in Aleksandrov's Circus." Russian Review, Janaury 2007, vol. 66, no. 1: 5-22.

Poles Apart: Women in Modern Polish Culture. A special issue of Indiana Slavic Studies, edited and introduced by Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren. November 2006.

The Russian Memoir: History and Literature. Edited and introduced by Beth Holmgren. Northwestern University Press, 2003.

Keys to Happiness by Anastasya Verbitskaya. Edited, abridged, translated and introduced by Beth Holmgren and Helena Goscilo.  Indiana University Press, 1999. The most sensationally popular "woman's novel" of tsarist Russia.

Rewriting Capitalism: Literature and the Market in Late Tsarist Russia and the Kingdom of Poland. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.  Winner of Waclaw Lednick Humanities Prize, Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences.

Russia.Women.Culture. Edited by Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren. Indiana University Press, 1996.

Women’s Works in Stalin’s Time: On Lidiia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelstam. Indiana University Press, 1993.