Curriculum Vitae
OLGA V. SOLOVIEVA
The University of Chicago
Comparative Literature
Phone: (773) 834-3980
Education
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Film Studies, Yale University, 2006
M.A. in Modern German Literature, Medieval German Literature & Language, and Russian, Freie Universität Berlin, 1997
Positions Held
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, The University of Chicago, 2015 -
Postdoctoral Scholar and Lecturer, The University of Chicago, 2011-2015
Visiting Assistant Professor of Film, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-2008
Lecturer in Film, Yale University, Spring 2007
Lecturer in Film, Smith College, Winter 2006
Instructor, Yale Film Summer School, Summer 2006, 2005
Teaching Assistant, Yale University, 2002-2007
Teaching Associate, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1998-2000
Awards
2006 Student Writing Award of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (2nd place)
2002 Annual Grand Marnier Award for Film Criticism of the Lincoln Center, New York
1997 Annual DAAD-Award for Outstanding Achievements of International Students
Fellowships
Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Committee on Social Thought, The University of Chicago, 2012-2015
Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Germanic Studies, The University of Chicago, 2011-2012
Ralph Gregory Elliot Memorial Scholarship, UConn, School of Law, 2010-2011
Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation Scholarship (for research at the Berlin State Museum of Prints and Drawings), Fall Semester 2009
John Perry Miller Fellowship (for dissertation research), Summer 2004
John F. Enders Fellowship (for dissertation research), Summer 2003
Yale University Graduate Fellowship, 2000-2006
University of Massachusetts Fellowship, Fall Semester 1997
Protestant Foundation Fellowship for East-European Students at the Freie Universität Berlin, April-September 1997
Fellowship of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Graduate Studies, 1993-97
DAAD Fellowship for the Advanced Study of German Language and Literature at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, October 1991-February 1992
Publications
Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017).
Chernobyl, the Unheard Prayer: Svetlana Aleksievich and the Little Voices of Fukushima, under review.
“Peepshow, Death Camp, Art Gallery: The Spaces of Pasolini’s Salò and Mauri’s Intellettuale,” forthcoming in ASAP.
“Horror Old and New: Nakata Hideo’s Ringu (1998) between J-Horror and Hibakusha Cinema.“ Forthcoming in A Companion to Japanese Cinema, ed. David Desser, New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
“Rhetoric of the Body of Christ and the Pitfalls of American Democracy.“ Forthcoming in Religion, Memory and Transmediality in Contemporary Cultural Practices, ed. Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru and Dragoș Manea, Leiden: Brill Publishers.
“Rebellion: A Note on Agamben’s Reception of Dostoevsky in The Open.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 43.4 (2016): 520-530.
“Foreword” to Haun Saussy, Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and its Techniques (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2016), ix-xii.
“Identifying the Suspect: Lang’s M and the Trajectories of Film Criticism.” A Companion to Fritz Lang, ed. Joseph McElhaney (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 94-113.
“Kurosawa Akira’s The Lower Depths: Beggar Cinema at the Disjuncture of Times.” Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 5.1 & 2 (2013): 37-58. Reprinted in Chinese translation by Yan Peiwen in Zhongguo xueshu (China Scholarship), 12.1 (2015): 200-231.
“A Review of Mass Appeal. The Formative Age of the Movies, Radio, and TV.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 30:3 (2013): 258-261.
“Epiphanius of Salamis Between Church and State: New Perspectives on the Iconoclastic Fragments.” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum / Journal of Ancient Christianity, 16.2 (2012): 344-367.
“Fassbinder’s France: Genet’s Mise-en-Scène in Fassbinder’s Films.” A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ed. Brigitte Peucker (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 333-351.
“The Portrayal of a Murderer in Fritz Lang’s M: Toward an Effect of Three-Dimensionality in the Classical Cinema.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 29.1 (2012): 50-63.
“The Intellectual Embodied in his Medium, or the Cinematic Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini.” Italian Culture, 29.1 (2011): 52-68.
“The Erased Grave of Dersu Uzala: Kurosawa’s Cinema of Memory and Mourning.” Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 2.1 (2010): 63-79. Reprinted in Chinese translation by He Tian in Zhongguo xueshu (China Scholarship), 9.1 (2011): 177-198.
“Epiphanius of Salamis and his Invention of Iconoclasm in the Fourth Century A.D.” Fides et Historia, 42.1 (2010): 21-46.
“‘Bizarre Epik des Augenblicks’: Gottfried Benn’s ‘Answer to the Literary Emigrants’ in the Context of his Early Prose.” German Studies Review, 33.1 (2o10): 119-140.
“Kurosawa Akira’s The Idiot: Where the East Meets the West.” Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 1.2 (2009): 129-142.
“Polyphonie und Karneval: Spuren Dostoevskijs in Thomas Manns Roman Doktor Faustus.” Poetica, 3-4 (2005): 463-494.
“Corpus Libri als Corpus Christi: Zur prekären Transsubstantiation des alchemistischen Sprachstoffes im Buch der Heiligen Dreifaltigkeit (1415-1419).” Poetiken der Materie: Stoffe und ihre Qualitäten in Literatur, Kunst und Philosophie, ed. Thomas Strässle and Caroline Tora-Mattenklott (Freiburg a.B.: Rombach, 2005), 145-164.
“Joachim Maass.” Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800-1950 (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2003).
“Heilige Zeichen von Ulrike Janssen.” Germanistik, 1-2 (2003).
“Dress Code: You Are What You Wear in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.” Film Comment, Nov./Dec. (2002): 53-56.
“Deutsch-Amerikanische Erfahrungen.” Tagesspiegel, Nov. 20, 1998.
Electronic Publications
Contributor to www.printculture.com (collective blogzine).
“The Pitfalls of Meritocracy: James J. Tissot’s ‘Prodigal Son’ Etchings at the Smart Museum,” May 31, 2015. Sightings (blog of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago)
Work in Progress
“Das anatomische Theater des Eleven Schiller: Vom Ereignishaften der Kritik und vom Körperlichen der Diskurse in der Textgestaltung der Räuber.”
The Russian Kurosawa (book)
Review of the book by Svetlana Aleksievich, Secondhand Time.
Review of the English-language edition of Shklovsky Reader.
Conference Papers and Lectures
“Ethnography as Reconnaissance: Arseniev’s Dersu Uzala at the Clash of Empires,” ASEEES Conference, Washington, DC, November 2016
“Nakata Hideo’s Ringu (1998) and the Memories of Atom Bombings,” Humanities Day Lecture, October 2016
“On Dostoevsky and Holbein,” Lecture, Franke Institute for Humanities, University of Chicago, April 2016
“Dostoevsky, Doktor Faustus, Bakhtin: A Cycle of Influence,” Conference: Found in Translation: Russia and the West in Dialogue, University of Chicago, April 2016
“Horror Old and New: Nakata Hideo’s Ringu (1998) between J-Horror and Hibakusha Cinema.“ Keynote Address, Conference: ‚Why All the Fuss about the Body?,’ University of the South, April 2016
“Large Scale Form: The Function of Music in Theorizing Cinematic Hybridity,”
SCMS Conference, Atlanta, GA, April 2016
“Modern Rewritings of the Gospel Narratives,” ACLA Conference, Harvard University, March, 2016
“James J. Tissot and his ‘Prodigal Son’ Etchings at the Smart Museum of the University of Chicago,” Lecture, Humanities Day, University of Chicago, October 2015
“Form and Formlessness in Thomas Mann's 'Goethe and Tolstoy' ”
Comparative Literature Conference, University of Chicago Center in Paris, April 2015
“War Photography and Avant-garde Performance in Kurosawa Akira’s The Lower Depths (1957)”
SCMS Conference, Seattle, WA, March 2014 (in absentia)
Lecture, University of Otago, New Zealand, October 2014
Lecture, University of California, Irvine, November 2015
Lecture, National University of Australia, Canberra, December 2016
“A Portrait of the Artist as President’s Wife: Maude Hutchins at the University of Chicago”
Lecture, Humanities Day, University of Chicago, October 2013
“Kurosawa’s Russia”
Lecture, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Chicago, May 2013
“Movement Through Time and Space: Dersu Uzala from Arseniev’s Diaries to Kurosawa’s Film”
Keynote Address, Slavic Forum, University of Chicago, April 2013
Comparative Literature Conference, University of Chicago Center in Paris, July 2013
Lecture, University of Otago, New Zealand, September 2014
“The Battle for Montage: Godard Between Politics and History”
ACLA Conference, University of Toronto, April 2013 (in absentia)
“Stages of an Exile: Thomas Mann in Chicago.”
Lecture, Humanities Day, University of Chicago, October 2012
“Thomas Mann and the Limits of Irony: The Lesson of Mann’s Political Writings.”
Conference, Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas, McGill University, April 2012
“Can Common Law Be Kafkaesque?”
Conference, Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities, Texas Wesleyan School of Law, March 2012
“Colliding Languages in Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala.”
Alternative SCMS Conference, Tokyo, Japan, May 2009
“Machines, Bodies, Poetry: Mallarmé, Pasolini, and Sign Language Poets.”
Lecture, Yale University, April 2008
“The Religious and the Political in the Status of the Generic Self’: From Kierkegaard’s Either/Or to Contemporary Debates on Universalism.”
ACLA Conference, Long Beach, CA, April 2008
“Akira Kurosawa’s Adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot: Where the East Meets the West.”
SCMS Conference, Philadelphia, PA, March 2008
“Rebellion: Agamben’s Reception of Dostoevsky in The Open.”
Lecture, School of Humanities, UC Irvine, January 2007
“Man and Animal in Dostoevsky’s Genealogy of Ethical Consciousness.”
ACLA Conference, Princeton, April 2006
“Intellectuals, Cinema, and the Task of Mourning: A Response to Hans Magnus Enzensberger by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Fabio Mauri, May 31, 1975.”
Lecture, University of Virginia, January 2006
“The Scene of Christ, or the Embodied Camera in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo.”
Lecture, 16 Beaver Artist Organization, New York, August 2005
“The Aesthetic of Deafness in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Cinematic Transliteration of The Gospel According to Matthew.”
SCMS Conference, London, UK, March 2005
“Epiphanius of Salamis, or the Invention of Iconoclasm.”
Open Forum Lecture, Department of Comparative Literature, Yale University, December 2004
“Surrealism and the French New Wave.”
Lecture, Yale University, October 2002
“A Murderer’s Portrait: Visualizing the Invisible in Fritz Lang’s M.”
Twenty-Fourth Annual Colloquium on Literature and Film at West Virginia University, September 1999
Current Research Projects
Thomas Mann’s Russia (book)
Maude Hutchins (book and a performance)
What is Music for Film Theory? (book with Victor Fan)
Curatorial Experience
“Japanese Ghost Films” (with Angela Dalle Vacche, Allison Whitney, Andrea Wood), Georgia Institute of Technology, April 2008
“The Russian Kurosawa,” The University of Chicago, May 2013
“Maude Hutchins” (performance with the story-teller Judith Heineman, in progress)
University Service
Director of Undergraduate Studies, Fall 2017 –
Organizer of the Departmental Colloquium in Comparative Literature, 2016-
Model Class Teaching for the Parents Weekend, Fall 2016
Member of the Undergraduate Curriculum Revision Committee (Department of Comparative Literature), 2016-17
Dissertation Year Fellowship Committee (Humanities Division), 2016
Dean’s representative at the dissertation defense of Michelle Urberg (Department of Music), Spring 2016
Graduate Admissions Committee (Department of Comparative Literature), 2015-16
Dean’s representative at the dissertation defense of James Nemiroff (Department of Romance Languages and Literatures), Fall 2015
Other Professional Activities
Member of the Educational Board of the Hyde Park Art Center, 2017-
Organized the reading of the Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan for the CEERES of Voices series at the Seminary Co-Op, Spring 2017
Post-show Discussion of Chekov’s “Uncle Vanya” at the Lookingglass Theater, Chicago, Fall 2016
Teaching Experience
The University of Chicago
CMLT 33302, EALC 23312, EALC 33312, REES 29814, REES 39814, SCTH 34012, CMST 24922, CMST 34922: “Kurosawa and His Sources,” Spring 2017
FNDL 25100, CMLT 25103, GRMN 25117, JWSC 23402, RLST 28215: “Thomas Mann, Joseph and his Brothers,” Spring 2017
Huma 12400: “Human Being and Citizen-2,” Winter 2017
CMLT 20109, REES 29813, ENGL 28918: „Comparative Methods in the Humanities,“ Winter 2017
CMLT 21705/31705; REES; German: „The Novel-Essay and Its Past: From Artsybashev’s Sanin to Musil’s Man Without Qualities,“ Spring 2016
Huma16100-02: “Media Aesthetics 3: Sound,” Spring 2016
Huma 16100-03: “Media Aesthetics 2: Text,” Winter 2016
CMLT 21704; REES 29810: Intercultural Adaptation: Kurosawa and his Russian Sources, Fall 2015
Huma 22305: The Films of Jean-Luc Godard, Spring 2015
CMLT 34410: Kurosawa and his Sources, Winter 2014
CMLT 24409/34409: Modern Rewritings of the Gospel Narratives, Spring 2013
German 25312: Thomas Mann In His Epoch, Spring 2012
Georgia Institute of Technology
Film 2500: Introduction to Film Studies, Fall 2007, Spring 2008
Film 3254: Film History, Fall 2007
Film 3256: The Films of Jean-Luc Godard, Spring 2008
Yale University
Film 320: Close Analysis of Film, Spring 2007
Smith College
Film 350: The Scary Movie: Horror Film from the Silent Era to the 1970s, Fall 2006
Yale Summer Film Institute
Film S-167: Quentin Tarantino: Film and Pop Culture, Summer 2005/2006
Yale University, Teaching Assistantships
Film 321: Hollywood in the Twenty-First Century, Spring 2007
(Prof. Ron Gregg)
Sociology 134/Women and Gender Studies 110: Sex and Gender in Society, Fall 2006 (Prof. Jennifer Bair)
Literature 206/Russian 255/RSEE 255: Studies in the Novel: Tolstoy, Spring 2006 (Prof. Vladimir Alexandrov)
Literature 208/Russian 256/RSEE 256: Studies in the Novel: Dostoevsky, Fall 2005 (Prof. Kate Holland)
Literature 143b/Film 240b: World Cinema, Spring 2005 (Prof. Dudley Andrew)
Literature 198/German 250: German Culture and Literature in the Age of Goethe, Fall 2004 (Prof. Cyrus Hamlin)
Film 340/Literature 343: Issues in Contemporary Film Theory, Spring 2003 (Prof. Francesco Casetti)
Film 150: Introduction to Film Studies, Fall 2002 (Prof. Charles Musser)
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1997-2000
German 110, 130: Introductory and Intermediate German
Professional Memberships
American Comparative Literature Association
Modern Language Association of America
Association for the Study of Law, Culture and Humanities
Society for Cinema and Media Studies
American Academy of Religion
Languages
English (fluent), Russian (fluent), German (fluent), French (reading knowledge), Italian (reading knowledge), Middle High German (reading knowledge), Latin (reading knowledge)
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