Princeton University Professor Caryl Emerson will deliver the Hansmann Lecture on Thursday, Oct. 18, at 4:10 p.m., in the Science Center’s Kennedy Auditorium. Emerson is a professor of comparative literature and the A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton. The lecture, part of the Humanities Forum, is titled “Eugene Onegin the Play: Pushkin, Prokofiev, and the Stalinist Stage.” It is free and open to the public.
Emerson focuses on nineteenth century Russian classical authors including Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, as well as the Russian philosopher of language Mikhail Bakhtin. She has also researched Russian opera, instrumental and incidental music. Currently Emerson is studying the relationships between Tolstoy, Bernard Shaw and Shakespeare; the work of Russian modernist Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky; the adaptation of Russian literary classics in the Stalinist era; and the ultimate fate and purpose of the humanities.
The 2011-13 Hamilton College Humanities Forum examines the promises and problems of translation across languages, times, and cultures. The topic includes not only literary translation, but also translation from one artistic medium to another (for example, novel to film), as well as the work of translation within intercultural exchange and social transformation. The two-year long Forum will include presentations by artists, filmmakers, linguists, poets, scholars, philosophers, theorists, writers and others who explore or engage in translation in our age of global communication.
