Molly Brunson

Faculty Director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program

I am an Associate Professor in Slavic Languages and Literatures, with a secondary appointment in History of Art at Yale University.

As a scholar of modern Russian culture, I specialize in the literature and visual art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on the recurrent realisms that emerged in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Spanning a broad historical scope, my research encompasses topics as diverse as the socially conscious genre painting of the early nineteenth century and the sweeping novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to the avant-garde’s claims to the “real” and the rise of Soviet socialist realism. I am particularly interested in aesthetics and interart studies; theories of the realism and the novel; vision, optics, and visual cultural studies; material culture and the decorative arts; ecology, industry, and the representation of urban and rural space; and the transnational and transhistorical networks of modern culture.

In my book, Russian Realisms: Literature and Painting, 1840–1890, I articulated a theory of Russian realism based on the encounters between word and image in canonical works of literature and painting (by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Ilya Repin, as well as the important but lesser known painters Pavel Fedotov and Vasily Perov). Russian Realisms was awarded the Best Book in Cultural Studies by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages in 2017, as well as the College Art Association’s Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies First Book Subvention Award. I am currently working on a book—The Russian Point of View: Perspective and the Birth of Modern Russian Culture—that tells the story of how linear perspective came to Russia, engaged with native aesthetic systems, and ultimately shaped the emergence of a national culture in the nineteenth century and the radical avant-garde experimentation of the twentieth.  My next project - The Underground: Mining and Matter in Russian Culture - will consider the literary, material, and visual culture of the industrial underground in the Russian empire.

Like my scholarship, my teaching is defined by its interdisciplinary and comparative range, for which I was awarded the Poorvu Family Prize for Interdisciplinary Teaching in Yale College in 2013. I seek to bring fresh perspectives to the Russian literary and painterly canons by integrating the traditions of Slavic studies, comparative literature, and art history.  I offer undergraduate and graduate courses on Russian realism in literature and the visual arts; the history of Russian art from the eighteenth century to the present; Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and theories of the novel; and Russian artistic culture during the long nineteenth century. I have also organized a number of events and working groups, including an international conference in fall 2016, The Russian Century: The Literary, Visual, and Performing Arts, 1801–1917.

I have lectured widely on my research, including at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the University of Cambridge, the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice, Indiana University, Princeton University, Stanford University, New York University, University of Toronto, and the University of California, Berkeley. During summer 2016, I was named a fellow at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.