 | Robert Alter, University of California at Berkeley.
Ph.D. Harvard University, 1962. Professor Alter has taught at Berkeley
since 1967. He has published widely on the modern European and American
novel, on modern Hebrew Literature, and on literary aspects of the
Bible. The 1995 recipient of the Scholarship Award for Social and
Cultural Studies of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, Prof.
Alter is the author of two prize winning volumes on literary aspects of
the Bible, his works include Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity
in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (1991), The World of Biblical Literature
(1992) and Hebrew and Modernity (1994). His most recent work is Canon
and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (2000). |
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| Carol Avins, Rutgers University,
specializes in twentieth-century Russian literature, particularly the
1920's and 1930's. Her research focuses principally on how writers made
sense--and art--of the radical reshaping of society following the
Bolshevik Revolution. In Border Crossings: The West and Russian Identity
in Soviet Literature, 1917-1934 she explores how post-revolutionary
writers probed the redefinition of national and individual identity. Her
more recent work focuses on Isaac Babel, a major figure of this period,
whose stories confront the means and ends of societal transformation and
its consequences for the individual life. In her teaching, which ranges
far beyond Soviet literature into such areas as the novels of Vladimir
Nabokov and literary responses to the Holocaust, Prof. Avins is also
interested in the collision of the political and personal spheres. |
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| Patricia Blake, Davis Center
for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University. Patricia Blake's
career has largely been as a journalist with an abiding interest in
Russian literature of the Soviet period. She was a correspondent in the
Soviet Union for Time-Life and the consultant on Soviet affairs for
Time in New York. She has edited five collections in English
translation of Soviet-era Russian literature --some with Max
Hayward--including Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature,
Halfway to the Moon: New Writing from Russia, Writers in Russia,
and two books of poetry, one of Mayakovsky and the other of Voznesensky.
She is currently an Associate of Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and
Eurasian Studies, and is writing a biography of Babel.
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| Oleg Budnitsky, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Senior Fellow
of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences
and Director, International Center for Russian & East European Jewish
Studies.
He has authored or edited over 150 publications on 19th- and 20-century
Russia, the revolutionary movement, Jewry during the Russian Revolution
and Civil War and Russian emigration. These include, most recently:
Terrorizm v rossiiskom osvoboditel’nom dvizhenii: Ideologiia, etika,
psikhologiia (2000), Evrei i russkaia revolutsiia: Materialy i
issledovaniia (editor, 1999), Sovershenno lichno i doveritel’no!
V.A.Maklakov i B.A.Bakhmetev correspondence, 1919-1951, in 3 vols.
(editor, 2001-2002), Russia and the Russian Emigration in Memoirs and
Diaries: An Annotated Bibliography, 1917-1991 (co-editor, 2003)
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Oksana Bulgakowa, Stanford University,
includes among her research interests Russian and European Avant-garde;
Soviet Art and Literature of Stalinist Period; body images and body
language through film and visual art; films of Russian Émigrés in Europe
and the United States; the reciprocal impact and interdependency of
German and Russian film in the 1920s |
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| Marietta Chudakova, Institute of Literature, Moscow |
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| Gregory Freidin, Stanford University,
conceived the idea of writing a book about Babel while reading Philip Roth's
The Ghost Writer back in 1980 at Princeton, where he was doing research on Osip
Mandelstam. The result was a series of articles and a long biographical
essay, "Isaac Babel," published in European Writers (1990).
Books, articles (some on Babel), one
revolution, and one coup later, Freidin has returned to his old flame--only to discover that it,
too, has changed. The Other Babel is a book-length biographical
essay he hopes to complete this year. |
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Monika Greenleaf, Stanford University,
includes among her research interests The theory and practice of
eighteenth-century autobiography, Catherine the Great, the poetics of
Empire and subjectivity, Pushkin and Romanticism, Pushkin and the
modernists, comic prose of Gogol, Tsvetaeva, and Nabokov, visual art,
film and poetics, women's poetry, the novel. She is the author of
Pushkin and romantic fashion : fragment, elegy, Orient, irony (1994)
adn co-editor of Russian Subjects: empire, nation, and the culture of
the Golden Age (1998) |
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| Michael Gorham, Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Florida at Gainsville,
is the author of Speaking in Soviet Tongues : Language Culture and
the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia (2003).
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| Zsuzsa Hetényi, Associate Professor at Russian
Department, Eötvös Loránd University, ELTE, Budapest. Research
interests: The Russian Prose in the 20th century, Russian?Jewish Culture
and Literature, The Problems of Eschatology and Messianism in Russian
Literature, Theory, history and practice of literary translation |
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| Dr. Reinhard Krumm, Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Tashkent,
Uzbekistan, and Germany. Reinhard Krumm, born in Hamburg, Germany in
1962, received his M.A. in Russian History and Slavistics. After working
two years for Newsweek as a photographer in New York in the late
1980's, he went in 1991 to the former Soviet Union, where he wrote for
the Russian news agency Itar-Tass, the Berlin paper Der Tagesspiegel
and, in Riga, for the German press agency dpa. In 1996 he became the
Moscow correspondent for the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel,
where he got interested in the life and works of Isaac Babel. Upon his
return to Hamburg for Der Spiegel in 1998, he continued
researching and writing a biography of this extraordinary writer. He
also finished his PhD. Since 2003 he has been the project coordinator
for Central Asia for the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, a German political
foundation, and living in Tashkent, Uzbekistan with his family. |
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| Gabriella Safran, Stanford University,
includes among her interests Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
Russian literature; Polish literature; Yiddish literature; Jewish
Studies; folklore; Realism; the aesthetics of ethnicity; the
relationship between sacred and secular writing |
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| Efraim Sicher, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.
Sicher hangs around the Foreign Literatures Department of Ben-Gurion
University. He is well-known for his Babelomania, symptoms of which
appear in his two Russian editions of the prose works of the master, and
a book Style and Structure in the Prose of Isaac Babel (1986 and
still in print). He will talk about Babel in the context of Bialik and
other writers beginning with B, as well as some who do not. |
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Alexander Zholkovsky, University of Southern California.
Professor Zholkovsky researches Russian literary studies, with a focus
on Soviet Aesopian "art of adaptation", the poetics of bad writing and
intertextuality. He studies the power of grammar in Russian literature,
authoring numerous publications that examine how modern Russian writers
are engaged in reinterpretive dialogue with previous generations of
Russian literary masters. He also studies Russian writers whose works
span generations, including Karamzin, Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov,
Babel and Akhmatova, among others. |
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| Steven Zipperstein,
is the he Daniel E.
Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University.
He is the author of several monographs, including Imagining Russian
Jewry: Memory, History, Identity (1999) and The Jews of Odessa: A
Cultural History, 1794-1881 (1985).
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| Tianbing Wang was born in Xi'an, P.R. China. He studies Computer
Engineering and Art at Stanford, learning about Isaac Babel in a creative writing
class. He has published six books in China, including the
screenplay "Red Cavalry" (Writers Publishing House, Beijing, 1999), and
A Critique of Western Modern Art (1998), a translation of Frank Auerbach
by Robert Hughes (2003). He is now collaborating with Delin Ma on a
screen version of Babel's Red Cavalry.
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| Delin Ma was born in Xi'an China too.
He has been the cinematographer in more than twenty films, including the
"Knight of the double flag town," 1992, which is considered the first
Chinese Western and is still studied in film schools as a classic in
China. He won the Chinese Cinematographers Society Best Cinematography
Award for this film in 1992. The
film adaptation of Babel's Red Cavalry, called "Qi Bing Jun",
will be his director debut.
Delin Ma is also a horse lover and a fine horse rider. He fell in love
with Babel's vision immediately after he read Tianbing Wang's script in
1999 and he is determined to make
a compelling Chinese version of it now.
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