Jenifer Presto

I am a core faculty member in Comparative Literature. Prior to joining UO, I taught at the University of Virginia and the University of Southern California, where I also held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship. In addition, I did a yearlong stint as resident director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Moscow program. 

I work on Russian modernism in a transnational framework with an emphasis on gender studies and the environmental humanities. My most recent book, The Geopoetics of Catastrophe: Russian Modernism on Italian Terrain, is slated for publication in October. It takes a new ecocritical approach to the modernists' engagement with Italy, tracing the aesthetic resonance of Italy's natural disasters in Russian culture. My previous book, Beyond the Flesh: Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist Sublimation of Sex, is devoted to the interplay of gender and poetic self-creation in Russian Symbolism. 

I am currently at work on two new book projects, which bring together my interests in the environment and immigrant arts. The first, Nature's Icons: The Spiritual Ecology of Olga Volchkova, examines how this contemporary Russian-born artist celebrates nature's spiritual potentiality in an era of climate change and habitat loss. Trained in fine art and icon restoration in her native Tver, Volchkova resides in the Pacific Northwest, where she is engaged in "canonizing all the living creatures of nature" in her richly detailed paintings on wood. This generously illustrated volume will be the first major critical introduction to this remarkable painter who revitalizes the icon form to document the interconnections between flora, fauna, and humankind that have enabled us to thrive. 

I pursue my interest in diasporic ecologies in a different vein in my other monograph in progress, Nabokov's Ecological Niche: Literature between Nature and Nations. This study takes seriously the Russian American author's claim that his "old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property" and is, instead, the result of the loss of his "ecological niche." Positing literature's ecological niche as an alternative to the concept of world literature, I aim to offer a fresh reading of Nabokov – one that shows that his notion of the literary was as indebted to the native and the local as it was to the global.

In an allied initiative, I have collaborated with colleagues in UO Libraries on a digital humanities internship on Slavic Immigrant Artists in the Northwest (SIAN). SIAN enables students to earn credit for original research that is showcased on the SIAN website. There are no language requirements or prerequisites to participate, just a commitment to public research on the arts. Undergraduates should register for RUSS 404 and graduate students for RUSS 604. If you are interested in enrolling, please contact me for registration approval. 

Beyond UO, I serve as the editor of a book series on East European and Eurasian Ecologies: Past, Present, and Future. If you have a manuscript that might be a good fit for our list, do not hesitate to reach out to me. 

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