Join us on Monday, November 1st at 7pm EST for a virtual conversation between Russell Scott Valentino, Angelina Ilieva, and Nada Petković, hosted by the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies at the University of Chicago and Seminary Co-op Bookstore! They’ll be discussing Miljenko Jergović’s Kin, translated from the Croatian by Valentino.
The event will stream live here.
Russell Scott Valentino is an American author, literary scholar, and translator. He has translated works from Italian, Croatian, and Russian, and his essays, poetry, and translated fiction have appeared in journals such as The Iowa Review, Two Lines, POROI, Circumference, and 91st Meridian. He is the recipient of NEA Literature Fellowships for translation in prose (2002 & 2016) and poetry (2010) and he received a PEN/Heim award in 2016. He currently teaches Slavic and comparative literature at Indiana University.
Angelina Ilieva is a lecturer in South Slavic and Balkan Literatures at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago, where she teaches classes on literature, culture, and identities in South Eastern Europe. Her general interests include the relation between representation and identity, anthropological approaches to culture, and contemporary critical theory. In particular, she is working on the role of trauma and sublimity in the emotional power of national identity.
Nada Petković is the appointed lecturer of South Slavic Languages in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Her teaching focuses on second-language acquisition, as well as sociolinguistics, regional ethnography and literature, literary theory, cinema, and folklore. Recent projects include Balkan Epic: Song, History, Modernity (Scarecrow, 2012), an advanced level language textbook, Po naški through Fiction: An Annotated Chrestomathy of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Prose, and an online database of aspectual pairs of Croatian and Serbian verbs. She is editor-in-chief and founder of Leptir mašna, an annual literary journal that publishes the work of students in Balkan Studies at the University of Chicago. Petković is the recipient of many distinguished honors, including a Fulbright Visiting Scholar grant and awards from the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning. An active member of several professional organizations, she currently serves as president of the North American Society for Serbian Studies.
Read more and register for the event here.
