Rebecca Stanton (Ph.D. Columbia, 2004) works primarily on Russian prose of the Soviet period, in particular the "long 1920s" (1917-1934), although she has also published on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Lermontov, and Gogol.  Her first book, Isaac Babel and the Self-Invention of Odessan Modernism (Northwestern University Press, 2012) examines how the city of Odessa—as a canonical literary image and as a kaleidoscopic cultural milieu—shaped the narrative strategies developed by Isaac Babel and his contemporaries of the Revolutionary generation; and argues that these strategies, borrowed from the tricksters and rogues of Odessa lore, both reflected and resisted the aesthetics of Socialist Realism. 

Professor Stanton's teaching and research interests include the intersection of fiction and politics; narratives of the self; the politics of literacy and the literature of national/ethnic minorities in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union; and literary efforts to reshape reality (including Socialist Realism, mendacity, and magic). Secondary interests include popular and mass culture, Slavic-Jewish cultural relations, Russian and German modernism, and music. She holds a B.A. from Columbia in Russian and French literature, and completed a graduate minor in German literature. As her eclectic background might suggest, she is interested in "borderline" phenomena: mixed identities, surzhyk, he fate of texts as they cross boundaries between genres, generations, languages, historical eras, or national entities, and between performer and audience.

Currently, she is working on an article about Isaac Babel's use of Shakespeare, a book chapter on self-narrative in Lermontov's Hero of Our Time, and a full-length book project on magic and modernity in Soviet literature (1917- 58).

Professor Stanton teaches the following courses:

Russian G6039: Literature, Politics, and Tradition After Stalin 
Russian G6010: A Revolution in Literature, 1917-1934 
Comp.Lit./Russian G6110: The Discourse of Self in Russia & the West
History/Poli.Sci G8445: Legacies of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union
Comp.Lit./Russian W4190: Race, Ethnicity, Narrative in the Russian/Soviet Empire 
Comp.Lit. and Society W4080: Magic and Modernity 
Comp.Lit. and Society V3235: Imagining the Self 
Russian V3221: Literature & Revolution