As we begin the semester, we're highlighting Bryn Mawr's newest faculty members. The College supports faculty excellence in both research and teaching and is committed to social justice and inclusion in the classroom and in the community at large.
Assistant Professor of Russian
Bella Grigoryan
My current research sits at the intersection of the study of Russian literature, journalism, history, and politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My work brings a literature and cultural history specialist’s perspective to the broader enterprise that seeks to understand the shape taken by civil society and the public sphere in autocratic Russia.
In my first book, Noble Subjects: The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762-1861 (forthcoming from Northern Illinois University Press), I suggest that the Russian novelistic tradition developed as a carrier of a gendered (masculine) domestic and political ideology that was meant to articulate the rights and the obligations of the nobility as a social estate in an autocratic polity. My second book, Uncommon Readers: The Periodical Press and Educated Society in the Russian Empire, 1801-1839 (currently in preparation), will be devoted to an interpretative history of reading as a cultural and, to a degree, a political practice in the first half of the nineteenth century.
In addition to a lively research agenda in the Russian long nineteenth century, often in a comparative methodological context, I maintain a secondary area of expertise in modern Armenian culture from the late eighteenth century to the contemporary moment.
The Department of Russian, established in 1943, offers an undergraduate program of study that has become nationally and internationally renowned. The department awards the A.B. degree in Russian, and, formally, the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Second Language Acquisition in Russian. The department also supports the Russian Language Institute (RLI), which offers summer intensive Russian language courses at the beginning, intermediate and advanced levels.