• How to Participate
• Courses and Requirements
• Programming and Events

Program Description
The Interdisciplinary Cluster for Russian, East European and Jewish studies (ICREEJ) brings together faculty and graduate students from across Northwestern. Our goals are to:

• promote interdisciplinary exchange between faculty and graduate students
• provide an intellectual home for graduate students interested in exploring the history, literature and culture of Russia, Eastern Europe and the Jews from new perspectives
• garner institutional support for courses and programming to promote the exchange of ideas and the generation of new knowledge
• nurture a community of scholars with common interests

Students interested in pursuing a PhD in Art History, Comparative Literary Studies, English, French and Italian, German Literature and Critical Thought, History, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, Religion, Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Sociology are encouraged to find a second intellectual “home” in this interdisciplinary cluster.

We welcome you to learn more about our Fellows, programs and activities by exploring this Web site. If you have questions orrequire further information, please contact Prof. Séamas O’Driscoll at s-odriscoll@northwestern.edu

Participating Faculty
Faculty currently active in the Interdisciplinary Cluster for Russian, East European and Jewish Studies include:

• John Bushnell—History
• Clare Cavanagh—Slavic
• Elisabeth Elliott—Slavic
• Benjamin Fromer—History
• Nina Gourianova—Slavic
• Christina Kiaer—Art History
• Ilya Kutik—Slavic
• Susan McReynolds-Oddo—Slavic
• Marcus Moseley—German and Jewish Studies
• Gary Saul Morson—Slavic
• Inna Naroditskaya—Musicology
• Séamas O’Driscoll—Slavic
• Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern—History and Jewish Studies
• Andrew Wachtel—Slavic Faculty

Benjamin Frommer (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1999) specializes in the history of East-Central Europe, with a focus on the periods of Nazi and Communist rule. He is primarily interested in collaboration and resistance under repressive regimes, the use of courts for political ends, the consequences of ethnic cleansing, and the development of modern nationalism. Frommer is the author of National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Frommer's research and writing have been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), the Department of Education (Fulbright-Hays and Jacob K. Javits), and the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. During the academic year 2004-2005 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften  vom Menschen (Institute for Human Sciences) in Vienna, Austria. He is currently the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of History.

Susan McReynolds-Oddo. My intellectual interests include nineteenth-century Russian prose, especially Dostoevsky; intellectual history, especially the critiques of Western modernity generated by Russian and German culture; literary theory, especially New Economic Criticism; and the complex history of relations between artists, intellectuals, and anti-Semitism.

Marcus Moseley received a First Class M.A. degree in Religious Studies from the University of Edinburgh. He received his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. In 2006, Stanford University Press published his study of the history of Jewish Autobiography: Being For Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography. He is now working on his next book, From People of the Book to Literary Nation, a study of the impact of modern literary discourse and genres in Jewish Eastern Europe.

Gary Saul Morson works on the boundaries of literature and philosophy. He has written on the philosophy of time, utopia and anti-utopia, genre theory, the theory of the novel, the nature of ethics in literature, and (his own term) prosaics. He concentrates on fiction of ideas, especially Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and on theories describing it, especially those of Mikhail Bakhtin. He has recently completed a book on Anna Karenina and is writing one on aphorisms and other forms of quotation.

Inna Naroditskaya. I am an ethnomusicologist/musicologist teaching in the School of Music. One of my two areas of specialization is Music and Islam, particularly Azerbaijan, the Caucasus, and Central Asia in the Soviet period and afterwards. My other research area is Russian imperial music and culture of the eighteenth century. I also teach Russian modernism and Russian fairy tales and operas.

Séamas O’Driscoll works on the cultural history of capitalism in pre-Revolutionary Russia. The major focus of his work is understanding the interaction of political economic thought and fiction-making during the period of Russian realism. He is currently working on two edited volumes exploring New Economic Criticism in the context of Russian and other Slavic cultures.

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern is an Assistant Professor of Jewish History in History Department at Northwestern University and theCrown Family Center for Jewish Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Moscow University, 1987, and a PhD in Modern Jewish History from Brandeis University, 2001. He published numerous articles on East European Jewish history and culture, Russian-Jewish literature, Kabbalah, and Hasidism, and submitted for publication two books, The Anti-Colonial Choice: the Making of the Ukrainian Jew, and Drafted into Modernity: Jewish Soldiers in the Russian Army, 1827-1917.

Andrew Wachtel. In general, I am interested in the relationship between literature/culture and larger social processes. Specifically, in most of my books (The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth, An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia, and Remaining Relevant after Communism. The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe) I attempt to elucidate the complex ways in which literature influences these larger social processes while simultaneously being influenced by them. I have a strong secondary interest in the interrelationship of literature and other art forms, particularly in the modernist period (see my books Petrushka: Sources and Contexts and Plays of Expectations: Intertextual Relations in Russian 20th-Century Drama).