Nadezhda Vikulina
Nadia is an international student from Dimitrovgrad, Russia. She earned her BA degree in comparative literature from Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Saint Petersburg, where she focused on American and Russian 20th-century poetry and translation.
During her master's degree at the University of Oregon, she continued to develop her interest in critical theory, comparative poetics, and art history, which resulted in a master's thesis titled “Arcadian Ruins: Images of the Past in Contemporary Russian Art.'' The thesis deals with poetry and photography that capture subversive, non-nostalgic encounters with overgrown post-Soviet urban sites and landscapes. While in Oregon, she became interested in Polish literature and attended a summer school at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.
At Harvard, Nadia has been expanding her comparative profile by completing a minor field in cultural studies and committing to Polish and German language study. Her dissertation project deals with modernist to contemporary literature and visual art that engage with the trope of Arcadia and pastoral landscapes. Emerging as a prominent theme in art dealing with the landscapes of the historical shifts, be it a post-revolutionary Petrograd disappearing into the grass or wild post-Soviet garden cities, the aesthetic vocabulary of pastoralism and overgrown Romantic ruins illuminates complex visions of history and art’s evolution.
Nadia is also a translator between Russian, English, and Polish. You can read her translation work in N+1, Paris Review, and EastEast journal. She is an assistant translation editor for Cicada Press.
Selected publications:
“I, Superimposed: Writing the Past of the Other in Caroline Clark’s Sovetica,” a book review in Tears in the Fence Journal, Issue 82.
Translation of Daria Serenko’s “Girls and Institutions” in N+1 Issue 48:
(https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-48/fiction-drama/girls-and-institutions/).
"On Nostalgia, Emigration, and Distance in Language: Introducing poems by Kaveh Akbar and Safia Elhillo" in EastEast Journal, (https://easteast.world/ru/posts/188).