Edyta M. Bojanowska (NHC Fellow, 2024–25)

Edyta M. Bojanowska is a scholar of nineteenth-century Russian literature and intellectual history. She focuses on questions of empire and nationalism and on interdisciplinary connections between literature and history. Her first book, Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism challenges the Russocentric myth of Gogol, a Ukrainian-born Russophone writer (which won the MLA Scaglione Prize for the best book in Slavic Studies). Her most recent book, A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada, uses a popular Russian travelog about Africa and Asia as a lens onto global imperial history and Russian colonial imagination (which won the AATSEEL award for the Best Book in Literary Scholarship and the Gustav Ranis International Book Prize). Her books have been translated into Ukrainian, Russian, and Chinese.

Bojanowska’s current book project is a postcolonial rereading of the Russian nineteenth-century canon. Her research aims to integrate Russia into accounts of European imperialism. Bojanowska earned her PhD from Harvard University and is currently professor of Slavic languages and literature at Yale University. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard Society of Fellows, the American Council of Learned Societies (in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton), and the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center at the University of Hokkaido, Japan. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Ab Imperio and a former member of the PMLA Advisory Committee.

Selected Publications

• Bojanowska, Edyta M. “Was Tolstoy a Colonial Landlord? The Dilemmas of Private Property and Settler Colonialism on the Bashkir Steppe.” Slavic Review 81, no. 2 (2022): 324–48.
• Bojanowska, Edyta M. “Race-ing the Russian Nineteenth Century.” Slavic Review 80, no. 2 (2021): 258–66.
• Bojanowska, Edyta M. “Pushkin’s ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’: The Slavic Question, Imperial Anxieties, and Geopolitics.” Pushkin Review 21 (2019): 11–33.
• Bojanowska, Edyta M. A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2018.
• Bojanowska, Edyta M. Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.