Ph.D., Columbia University, Department of French and Romance Languages and Literatures, 1982; undergraduate studies at the Facoltà di Lettere, Rome University, 1972, and Department of Romance Literatures, Warsaw University, 1964 -1968.
My main scholarly interests are modern European intellectual history and culture, especially the encounter between politics and literature. My first book, The Scar of Revolution, dealt with the 19th century French authors Alexis de Tocqueville and Astolphe de Custine (as well as the Polish Romantic Adam Mickiewicz) and their visions of Russia and the United States. I then wrote and edited numerous articles and books about the processes of democratization in East Central Europe. My latest book, The Fellowship of Poets, probes Polish-Russian historical and literary relations, especially as seen through the lens of the friendship between two national poets: Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky.
current project:
I continue to work on Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz, with a special attention to the issues of translation and transplantation of ideas. I am also working on the idea of intellectual scandal in 20th century European and American cultures. And I want to develop a project on violence in the nation-building ideologies and cultures of Eastern Europe.
courses:
19th and 20th Century Polish Poetry and Prose
Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky: Poetry and History
East European Literature and Politics
Children and War
authored books:
Joseph Brodsky, Czesław Miłosz, and the Fellowship of Poets.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
Miłosz-Brodski: pole magnetyczne. Kraków, Znak, 2007.
The Scar of Revolution: Custine, Tocqueville and the Romantic Imagination.
University of California Press, 1991.
New Polish language edition, 2000.
Slovak enlarged edition, 2000.
Romanian enlarged edition, 1997.
Polish enlarged edition, 1995.
The Art of Solidarity. The College of Staten Island, New York, 1985.
edited volumes:
Constitutionalism in East Central Europe. Discussions in Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, and Bratislava American Council of Learned Societies, 1994.
"W czterdziestym nas matko na Sybir zesłali..." (ed. with Jan Tomasz Gross)
Aneks Publishing House, London, 1984 (in Polish).
War Through Children's Eyes. (ed. with Jan Tomasz Gross)
Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1981.
