Julia Chadaga

SELECTED WORKS OF JULIA CHAGADA in the Macalester Digital Commons

Education: B.A. in English Literature, Wesleyan University (1993); Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University (2003)

Areas of Interest: Prof. Chadaga’s work brings together such fields as Russian literature, visual art, architecture, film, material culture, and the history of science. She has published on topics that include the relationship between religious discourse and electric light in the early Soviet period; mirrors as windows on Russian culture; illusion and ideology in Soviet subterranean spaces; and the relationship between art and crime in Chekhov and Nabokov.

Publications: Prof. Chadaga has published in the journals Russian Review, Slavic Review, Slavic and East European Journal, and Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature. She has an essay in the edited volume Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe. Her book Optical Play: Glass, Vision, and Spectacle in Russian Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2014) was shortlisted for the Historia Nova Prize for Best Book on Russian Intellectual and Cultural History. She has an essay on crime and terrorism in Russian literature forthcoming in The Oxford University Press Handbook of the Russian Novel.

Current Projects: She is currently working on two projects: a book on the intersections of creativity and crime in 19th and 20th century Russia, and a digital project on Russian material culture.

Course websites engaging with the Twin Cities community: 

Once We Arrived: Stories of Immigrants’ First Jobs: a website featuring students’ interviews with Twin Cities immigrants from diverse countries, including Russia, created as part of a new course funded by a grant from Project Pericles, an organization that promotes civic engagement within higher education.

Twin Cities Guide for Russian Speakers: a project begun by Prof. Chadaga in Advanced Russian, Fall 2020, to which students in subsequent iterations of the course have continued to contribute.

Personal: She enjoys creative writing, making mosaics, and exploring nature with her family.