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 in Russian and comparative literature with an emphasis on gender studies and the environmental humanities. My most recent book, The Geopoetics of Catastrophe: Russian Modernism on Italian Terrain, is due out in October. It takes an ecocritical approach to the modernists' engagement with Italy, tracing the 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 self-creation in the life and art of two of Russia's most compelling Symbolist poets. 

My current research project builds on my interests in the environment and immigrant arts. Tentatively titled Nature's Icons: The Spiritual Ecology of Olga Volchkova, this study explores how this contemporary Russian-born Northwest artist celebrates nature's spiritual potentiality in an era of climate change and habitat loss. It 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. 

Another long-term project – Nabokov's Ecological Niche: Literature between Nature and Nations – addresses the problem of diasporic ecologies in a slightly different vein. Here I take seriously the Russian American author and naturalist'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 the writer's ecological niche as an alternative to the concept of world literature, I offer a fresh reading of Nabokov – one that shows that his notion of the literary was as indebted to the native and local as it was to the global. 

Aside from working on these books and allied articles, I have been involved in several editorial projects. I have coedited special issues of flagship journals on Russian Geopoetics and The 1917 Revolution and Its Ripple Effects. I have also collaborated with UO students and colleagues on a digital humanities project on Slavic Immigrant Artists in the Northwest (SIAN). 

Beyond UO, I serve as an associate editor of Comparative Literature, the oldest journal in the field. I am also the editor of a new book series on East European and Eurasian Ecologies: Past, Present, and Future. 

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