JMWJustin McCabe Weir is Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Professor of Comparative Literature, and a faculty affiliate of the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies. He received his BA in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Minnesota in 1991, and an MA (1993) and PhD (1997) in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Northwestern University. Weir writes and teaches primarily about novels, literary theory, and film.

 

He is currently co-editing, with Julie Buckler, The Oxford Handbook of the Russian Novel (under contract with Oxford UP, expected 2021), and writing an essay about Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich. Other work in progress includes an essay on the war stories of Isaac Babel, a longer study of Dmitry Pisarev and nihilism, and additional essays on Leo Tolstoy.

 

He regularly teaches a wide range of courses, including a General Education course on ethics in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (Gen Ed 1059), a Freshman Seminar on war in fiction and film (FS 62P), a comparative theory course (CompLit 122/Slavic 184: Soviet Theory and the West), an advanced course on Russian Intellectual History (Slavic 252), and courses devoted to the novels of Nabokov (CompLit 153/Slavic 154) and the major fiction of Dostoevsky (Slavic 131). He recently started teaching a new course with Professor Jonathan Bolton entitled Document, Testimony, and Political Fictions (CompLit 189/Slavic 181).

 

His publications include a volume of translations edited and translated with Tim Langen (Eight Russian Plays, Northwestern UP, 2000), and two monographs devoted to Russian novelists: The Author as Hero: Self and Tradition in Nabokov, Pasternak, and Bulgakov (Northwestern UP, 2002, reprinted 2011), and Leo Tolstoy and the Alibi of Narrative (Yale UP, 2011). A Russian translation of The Author as Hero is due to be published by Academic Studies Press in 2021.