Profile

Katya Hokanson received her Ph. D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Humanities from Stanford University in 1994. Her current book project isTheatrical Asides: Gender and Nation in Russian Women's Travel Writing, which has grown out of the burgeoning interest in, and increasing availability of, Russian women’s writings of the nineteenth century, as well as her teaching of Russian women’s writing and travel literature.  She contributed an article on Pushkin’s political poetry, “The ‘Anti-Polish’ Poems and ‘I Built Myself a Monument…’:  Politics and Poetry,” and translated two other scholars’ articles for a collection entitled The Other Pushkiniana: Taboo Texts, Topics, Interpretations, edited by Alyssa Gillespie, a volume currently under review by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Prof. Hokanson’s first book, Writing at Russia's Border ( University of Toronto Press, 2008) argues that it was the literature produced at the periphery of empire that brought Russia to prominence and gave it a "national" character for the first time. Other publications include “Russian Women Travelers in Central Asia and India,” in The Russian Review (January 2011) “Suwarrow, Souvaroff:  Byron's Russia and Pushkin's Political Poems of 1831,” in Zapadnyi pushkinizm i rossiiskii baironizm:  problemy vzaimosviaze (2009), “In Defense of Empire: ‘The Bronze Horseman’ and ‘To the Slanderers of Russia,’” Beyond the Empire: Images of Russia in the Eurasian Cultural Context, Hokkaido University Slavic Research Center (2008), “‘Barbarus hic ego sum’: Pushkin and Ovid on the Pontic Shore,” Pushkin Review 8: 2005, "Onegin's Journey: The Orient Revisited" ( Pushkin Review 3: 2000), "The Captivating Crimea: Visions of Empire in 'The Fountain of Bakhchisarai,'" inRussian Subjects: Nation, Empire, and Russia's Golden Age, ed. Monika Greenleaf and Stephen Moeller-Sally (Northwestern University Press, 1998), and "Literary Imperialism, Narodnost', and Pushkin's Invention of the Caucasus" ( The Russian Review 53: 1994).

Prof. Hokanson's current research interests include the history of Russian colonialism in the Caucasus and Central Asia, the writing of Aleksandr Pushkin, and Russian women writers of the nineteenth century, particularly Madame Blavatsky. Her teaching focuses on Russian and European literature of the nineteenth century and literary theory.