The Russian Faculty

Robin Feuer Miller

Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature
Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities

Professor Robin Feuer Miller has been at Brandeis since 1985. From1994-2000 she served as Dean of Arts and Sciences and is now glad to have returned to teaching and writing. Her course offerings include: 19th Century Russian Literature, The Short Story in Russia, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Dickens and Dostoevsky, Women in Russian Literature, and The Literature of Autobiography, Childhood Reminiscence, and Confession. She also offers a USEM, Children's Literature and the Construction of Childhood.

Professor Miller's research interests center around the nineteenth century novel. She is the author of Dostoevsky and The Idiot: Author, Narrator, and Reader (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); and The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1992). She is the editor of Critical Essays on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace (by Kathryn B. Feuer), and The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel. She coedited these last two volumes with colleagues from Canada and Great Britain. She is also the author of numerous articles and reviews and is active in a variety of professional organizations.

Joan F. Chevalier

Lecturer
Russian Language Coordinator

Joan Chevalier teaches courses in Russian language and Russian culture including: courses designed specifically for Heritages speaker of Russian. In addition to the regular sequence of Russian 10, 20, and 30, Ms. Chevalier offers advanced language content-based language courses focusing on aspects of contemporary Russian culture. She also regularly teaches a USEM entitled, "Language and Identity." Ms. Chevalier received her Ph.D. in Slavic Linguistics. Her research interests include topics related to bilingualism and language in immigration, as well as foreign language pedagogy.

David Powelstock

Assistant Professor of Russian and East European Literature
Chair, Russian and East European Studies Program Undergraduate Advising Head

David Powelstock received his PhD in Russian and Czech literatures from the University of California at Berkeley. Since then he has taught these subjects at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. Professor Powelstock offers courses in Russian literature, especially twentieth-century prose, as well as poetry and drama of all epochs. His newest offering is Contemporary East European Literature, which focuses on the late Communist and post-Communist periods, and looks at the best works from the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, the Former Yugoslavia, as well as Russia and other countries in the region, in this historical context. Professor Powelstock's research interests include Russian poetry of the Romantic period, contemporary Russian and Czech literature, and Russian Modernism. He is particularly interested in two broad questions about literature: how literary texts affect their readers' consciousness; and the various and changing roles that writers and their works play in history and culture across different ages and traditions. His book, Becoming Mikhail Lermontov: The Ironies of Romantic Individualism in Russia, will soon be published by Northwestern University Press, and he is the author of numerous other articles on Russian literature. He has also translated contemporary literature from Czech and Russian, including the poems of Jáchym Topol and two novels by Iva Pekárková.