Valeria Sobol, Associate Professor/Language Program Coordinator
Contact
Phone: (217) 244-1063
Email: vsobol@illinois.edu
Office: 3133 FLB; MW 3-4pm, and by appointment
Degree
Ph.D., Columbia University, 2003
Major Interests
Russian literature and culture of the late eighteenth--nineteenth centuries; gothic/uncanny and empire; literature and science; travel literature; Ukrainian and Czech literatures.
Publications
Books
- Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009). Author interview on Rorotoko. Finalist for the 2010 AATSEEL prize for best new book in Slavic literature/culture.
- Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe, edited by Mark Steinberg and Valeria Sobol (DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 2011).
Articles
- "The Uncanny Frontier of Russian Identity: Travel, Ethnography, and Empire in Lermontov's 'Taman''." The Russian Review 70 (January 2011): 65-79.
- "'Pocemu zimoj ne byvaet groma?': Gurov, Job, and Chekhovian Epistemology in 'Dama s sobackoj.'" Russian Literature 66.2 (2009): 217-33.
- "In search of an Alternative Love Plot: Tolstoy, Science, and Post-Romantic Love Narratives." Tolstoy Studies Journal XIX (2007): 54-74.
- "'Febris Erotica': Alexander Herzen's Post-Romantic Physiology." Slavic Review 65, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 502-22.
- "Nerves, Brain, or Heart? The Physiology of Emotions and the Mind-Body Problem in Russian Sentimentalism." Russian Review 65. 1 (January 2006): 1-14.
- "'Yes, We Are Scythians': The Image of Russia in Josef Skvorecký's The Cowards." SEEJ 49.1 (Spring 2005): 79-93.
- "Reading the invisible: The Mind, the Body, and the Medical Examiner in Lev Tolstoy's Anna Karenina." In: Anna Karenina on Page and Screen. Studies in Slavic Cultures II, 2001. 9-29.
- "'Shumom bala utomlennyj'": The Physiological Aspect of the Society Ball and the Subversion of Romantic Rhetoric." Russian Literature XLIX-III (April 2001): 293-314.
- "The Eschatological Myth as a Basis for the Interpretation of E. A. Baratynskii's book Sumerki" in: Mifopoetychnyi pidkhid do interpretatsii khudozhnioho tekstu (Kyiv, 1995). In Russian.
Courses Recently Taught
- RUSS 418: 18th-century Russian Literature
- RUSS 225/CWL 249: Russian Lit and Revolution
- RUSS 444 Problems in Romanticism
- RUSS 323/520 Tolstoy
- RUSS 470 : Between East and West: The Literary Journey and the Exploration of Russian National Identity
- RUSS 501-502: Russian for Graduate Students I and II
- RUSS 220: Survey of 19th-Cent Russian Literature: Fallen Women and Superfluous Men