Abigail Weil
PhD, November 2019
Abigail Weil earned her B.A. in Russian and Eurasian Studies from Bard College in 2008. Her senior project, "All Happy Families: Parents, Children and the Self in Anna Karenina," examined the historical and philosophical context of the variety of family units in Tolstoy's masterpiece.
Upon graduation, she received a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship, enabling her to spend a year teaching English at the Ural State Pedagogical University in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
In spring 2013, she completed an M.A. at the University of Texas' Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. Abigail's Master's thesis "Between Then and Now, There and Here, Guilt and Innocence: Škvorecký’s Two Murders in my Double Life and the Ambiguities of Transitional Justice" combines historical and literary inquiry and is the first critical study of Czech author Josef Škvorecký’s autobiographical novel.
In the fall of 2013, Ms. Weil began the doctoral program in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard, with a focus on Czech and Russian literature. Since then, she has presented conference papers on the need for radical pedagogy in Slavic classrooms with Anna Karenina as a case study, the experimental war journalism of Jaroslav Hašek and Isaac Babel’, and the mechanisms of parody and mystification vis-à-vis Hašek’s ersatz political party, among others. Her article “To Revive Delight: A Poet's Restaurant Reviews in Early 1990s Prague” was published in the winter 2017 issue of Gastronomica. Ms. Weil also publishes cultural commentary and food writing for a general audience.
Ms. Weil has served as Teaching Fellow in Czech and Russian language courses, as well as courses on 19th century Russian literature, Czech literature under communism, and East European modernism. Her dissertation looks a questions of authorship and legitimacy in the works and legend of Jaroslav Hašek.