If you will need disability-related accommodations in order to participate, please email the contact person for the event.Early requests are strongly encouraged to allow sufficient time to meet your access needs.
Though most scholarship on Pushkin’s reception in the United States focuses on twentieth-century African American literature, the origins of this encounter remain poorly understood. In fact, nineteenth-century commentators on both sides of the Atlantic were obsessed with Pushkin’s racial heritage—as both a Russian, and as a canonical European writer of African descent. This collaborative lecture (presented by a transatlantic historian of race and a Slavist) brings together little-remembered newspaper records, personal correspondence, and others texts—from the mid-1830s onwards—to recover how Pushkin was regarded as a black intellectual.