Adrian Wanner
Liberal Arts Research Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature
Russian literature; translation; migration and diaspora literature
237 Burrowes Building
Phone: (814) 865-1097
Curriculum Vitae:
Education:
Ph.D. Russian Literature, Columbia University, 1992
Lic. Phil. (M.A. equivalent), French and Russian Philology, Zurich University, 1987
Leningrad, Leningrad State University, 1985-86
Paris, Universités Paris-IV and Paris-VIII, 1982-83
Maturität, Type A (Latin and Greek), Kantonsschule Schaffhausen, Switzerland, 1979
Biography:
Dr. Wanner grew up in Switzerland. After studying in France and the Soviet Union, he obtained a Ph.D. in Russian Literature from Columbia University in 1992. He has been teaching at Penn State since 1996. From 2001 to 2008 he served as head of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures. He has published numerous articles in Slavic and comparative literature journals and is the author of four monographs: Baudelaire in Russia (University Press of Florida, 1996), Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-Story (Northwestern University Press, 2003), Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora (Northwestern University Press, 2011), and The Bilingual Muse: Self-Translation among Russian Poets (Northwestern University Press, 2020). In addition, he has published six editions of Russian, Romanian, and Ukrainian poetry in his German verse translation. A new book containing 100 poems by twenty Russian exile poets living in interwar Paris is forthcoming in 2023.
Recent Courses
- RUS 142Y: Russian Literature in English Translation, 1870 to Present
- RUS/GER 143: The Culture of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany
- RUS 405: War and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry
- CMLIT 410: Theory and Practice of Literary Translation
Recent Publications
- “The Return of Marxist Discourse to Russian-American Fiction: Keith Gessen’s Novel A Terrible Country.” Comparative Literature Studies 59, no. 3 (2022), pp. 549-567.
- “Russisch-amerikanische Gegenwartsdichter als Selbstübersetzer.” In Wiederkehr des Subjekts? Perspektiven auf Philosophie, Poetik und die Lyrik der Gegenwart. Ed. Matthias Fechner, Nikolas Immer and Henrieke Stahl (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2022), pp. 227-238.
- “Russian-English Literary Translingualism: Switching from Cyrillic to Roman across the Atlantic.” In The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism. Ed. Steven G. Kellman and Natasha Lvovich (New York: Routledge, 2022), pp. 200-210.
- “Marina Tsvetaeva and Vladimir Nabokov as French Translators of Pushkin.” Slavic and East European Journal 65, no. 1 (Spring 2021), pp. 79-99.
- “Translingual Poetry and the Boundaries of Diaspora: The Self-Translations of Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky.” In Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora, 1920-2020. Ed. Maria Rubins (London: UCL Press, 2021), pp. 111-136.
