Hilde Hoogenboom (NHC Fellow, 2000–01)

Hilde Hoogenboom is associate professor of Russian at Arizona State University. She is an expert on Catherine the Great’s memoirs, which she translated from French (with Mark Cruse) for Modern Library at Penguin Random House (2005). The memoirs, supported by the National Humanities Center’s Lloyd Cotsen Linkage grant, have sold over 16,000 copies and been translated into Finnish. Forthcoming in 2025 are two books, both supported by the National Humanities Center and Social Sciences Research Council: a monograph, Noble Sentiments and the Rise of Russian Novels: A European Literary History (Toronto) and an edited volume The Khvoshchinskaya Sisters (with Anna Berman, Cornell), the fruits of an international team project on Russia’s Bronte sisters (see khvoshchinskie.web.illinois.edu). A Fellow at the National Humanities Center at the beginning of her career in 2000–01, Hoogenboom has returned twice as a resident associate (2017–18, 2024–25).

Selected Publications

• Hoogenboom, Hilde. “Estate Culture and Yasnaya Polyana.” In Tolstoy in Context, edited by Anna A. Berman, 28–35. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
• Hoogenboom, Hilde. “Sentimental Novels and Pushkin: European Literary Markets and Russian Readers.” Slavic Review 74, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 553–74.
• Hoogenboom, Hilde, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Irina Reyfman, eds. Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2008.
• Catherine II, Empress of Russia. The Memoirs of Catherine the Great. Translated by Mark Cruse and Hilde Hoogenboom. New York: Modern Library, 2005.
• Rosenholm, Arja, and Hilde Hoogenboom. “Я живу от почты до почты–” : из переписки Надежды Дмитриевны Хвощинской / [“I live from mail delivery to delivery:” From the Correspondence of N. D. Khvoshchinskaia. FrauenLiteraturGeschichte 14. F.K. Göpfert: Fichtenwalde, 2001.

Fellowship Work Summary, 2000–01

Hilde Hoogenboom wrote two chapters for her book on Identity and Realism: Russian Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century, and two chapters, “Gender and Literary Biography: Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia, a Reluctant Subject” and “Sisters: Nadezhda, Sof’ia, and Praskov’ia Khvoshchinskaia and a Tradition of Russian Women’s Writing,” for a volume entitled The Sisters Khvoshchinskaia (under consideration at Northwestern University Press) that she is co-editing with Joe Andrew and Arja Rosenholm. She wrote an article, entitled “Gender i literaturnaia biografiia: Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia, soprotivliaiushchiisia sub’;ekt,” published in Preobrazhenie (Moscow, 2001), and two other articles, “Autobiographers As (Generic) Crossdressers: Catherine II, Dashkova, and Durova” and “From Bibliography to Canon: Classifying Women in Russia, France, Germany, and England,” that have been submitted for publication. Her review of Russia through Women’s Eyes: Autobiographies from Tsarist Russia, edited by Toby W. Clyman and Judith Vowles, is forthcoming in Comparative Literature Studies. Her proposal for a new edition and introduction to Catherine the Great’s memoirs, for which she received the National Humanities Center’s Cotsen Linkage grant, is under consideration at Penguin Classics and Oxford World Classics.