Edyta Bojanowska, Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature and Director of the Russian and East European Program at Rutgers University, received her Ph.D. from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University in 2002. 

The subject of Edyta's presentation is The Frigate Pallada (1859), Ivan Goncharov's travelogue about Africa and Asia, which is based on his voyage with the official Russian mission to "open up" Japan in 1852-54.  Little known today, the book was a nineteenth-century bestseller which introduced Russian readers to the wider colonial world and located their own empire in it. Edyta will talk about Goncharov's visits to the ports of south-east Asia. In particular, she will focus on his prescient commentary on the rise of what we today know as globalization, which he connects to the spread of modern imperialism and global trade.