Edith Clowes
BOARD PRESIDENT CANDIDATE
Edith W. Clowes is the Brown-Forman Chair Emerita in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia. She holds a B.A. in Russian Language and Literature from Oberlin College and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale University. Clowes’ research interests span Russian and European intellectual history, with forays into Russian business culture and the sociology of pre-revolutionary Russian literature, literary cartography, and a recent exploration of digital humanities. She is the author, co-author, or co-editor of 16 books, multi-authored volumes, special journal forums, translations, and the major website and database “Mapping Imagined Geographies of Revolutionary Russia (1914-1922).” Her most recent book, Shredding the Map: Imagined Geographies of Revolutionary Russia, 1914-1922 (Amherst College Press, 2024), deploys digitally generated maps and graphs to analyze patterns of geo-emotional perception among revolution-era writers.
Over many decades, Clowes has marshaled an array of approaches to studying modern Russian writing culture. She is a recognized leader in intellectual history, sociology of culture, literary geography, and Slavic digital humanities. Her early work on Nietzsche in Russia (The Revolution of Moral Consciousness, Northern Illinois, 1988) has become required reading on Russian Modernism. Utopian thinking in late Soviet fiction was the subject of her second book, Russian Experimental Fiction: Resisting Ideology after Utopia (Princeton, 1993). The emergence of Russian philosophical discourse in literary art was the focus of her third book, Fiction’s Overcoat: Russian Literary Culture and the Question of Philosophy (Cornell, 2004). Through her work with historians James L. (Jay) West and Samuel Kassow, Clowes co-produced one of the foundational works on civil society in pre-revolutionary Russia (Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for a Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, Princeton, 1991).
Clowes’ pivot to literary cartography in Russian writing culture responded to the spatial turn in post-Soviet public discourse. As post-Soviet intellectual life turned toward the agonies of defining “Russia” as more than vast terrain, so her research has addressed facets first of post-Soviet imagined geography (Russia on the Edge, Cornell, 2011) and then revolution-era imagined geography in Shredding the Map. An international conference and edited volume (Russia’s Regional Identities: The Power of the Provinces, with Ani Kokobobo and Gisela Erbslöh,Routledge, 2018) investigated cultures and identities of Russian provinces.
Clowes has served on the editorial boards of several publications, among them, Russian Review (2007-2020), New Area Studies (2020- ), Losevskie chteniia (2004- ), REGION (2011- ), and the book series, Heidelberger Beiträge zur Slavistischen Philologie (2009- ). Notably, as an editor of Russian Review, Clowes shepherded a special issue on African Americans in Stalin’s Russia (2016).
Clowes has won numerous research grants and fellowships, including International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), Fulbright-Hays, ACLS, NEH, and DAAD. She has taught as visiting professor at the University of Michigan and the University of Heidelberg.
Clowes brings to the ASEEES board and the position of president cross-cultural and interdisciplinary breadth of vision. As a past director of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas (2008-2012) and organizer of many conferences, she has wide-ranging experience in area studies administration, event planning, and post-conference publication. Her edited book, Area Studies in the Global Age (Northern Illinois, 2016), spurred rethinking area studies beyond its original Cold-War goals. In her conference organization and multi-authored books, Clowes has worked across generations and cultures to mentor younger scholars. As president of ASEEES, she would continue to broaden the appeal of area studies and raise funds to assist younger scholars as we bring in a new generation under trying circumstances.