Dissertation: Semyon Nadson and the Cult of the Tubercular Poet
After graduating I’ve been focusing on teaching. I taught courses on Russian culture and literature at the now defunct Harvey Milk Institute in San Francisco and Polish language tutorials in Stanford’s Special Languages Program. In Fall 2000 I became a teaching fellow in the humanities in Stanford’s Introduction to the Humanities Program. I’ve taught freshman general humanities seminars on a wide range of topics for the last four years: “The Good Life,” “The Art of Living,” “Power and Passion: Women and Men from the Bible to the Present,” “Bodies in Place: Investigating Selfhood and Location,” and “Poetic Justice: Order and Imagination in Russia.” I really enjoy undergraduate teaching and have been extremely fortunate to teach not only Russian literature, culture, and film but also things like Greek and Latin Classics, Shakespeare, Ancient Japanese Literature, anthropological travel writing, Early Modern and Modern English literature, and much more. I work with a diverse set of colleagues who have been a great source of inspiration and support. I’ve been invited back to Berkeley to teach Slavic 45 (“Illness, Outsiders, and Other Obsessions, an Approach to 19th-Century Russian Literature”) for Fall 2004 and will also be team teaching a Stanford humanities course provocatively titled “Sex, It’s Pleasures and Cultures.”
Between 2007 and 2013, Robert Wessling has been serving as the Associate Director at the Stanford University Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies
He then became Associate Master and Chief of Students at University of Macau, supervising student life in a newly created residential college for international students
Academic Publications:
- “‘Pogib poet…. Pogib poetik’: Pushkin, Nadson, i malaia travma” in a trauma volume to be published by Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, edited by Serguei Oushakine, forthcoming 2005.
- “Vsevolod Garshin and Intelligentsia Fan Hysteria” in Madness and Madmen in Russian Culture, eds. Angela Brintlinger and Ilya Vinitsky, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, forthcoming.
- “Semen Iakovlevich Nadson” in Russian Literature in the Age of Realism, ed. Alyssa Dinega Gillespie, Vol. 277 in the series Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Group, 2003).