Dr. Megan Swift
Position
Contact
Credentials
PhD (U of Toronto)
Area of expertise
Slavic Studies, Russian Literature, Visual Arts
I first visited Russia on a high school trip in 1989, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. Since then I have become a specialist in Russian literature, art and culture, earning my PhD from the University of Toronto in 2002. My research interests include memorialization of the Soviet past in post-socialist Russia, Soviet children’s literature and book art, and Russian modernism and post-modernism. My teaching includes courses on the Culture of the Russian Revolution, Magic and the Fairy Tale World and Existence and Anxiety in Dostoevsky. I also teach in the graduate program in Cultural, Social and Political Thought.
My book was published by University of Toronto Press in 2020 and was awarded the CAS/Taylor and Francis Prize Book Prize.
My edited volume Revolutionary Aftereffects: Material, Social and Cultural Legacies of 1917 in Russia Today is coming out with University of Toronto Press in 2022.
I was awarded the Eileen Wallace Fellowship in Children’s Literature in 2012-13 and 2013-14 and served as President of our national organization, the Canadian Association of Slavists (CAS), from 2010 to 2014. In 2019 I was awarded the REACH Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research-Enriched Teaching.
Guest editor. Canadian Journal of Eurasian and Russian Studies. Special Issue on Canada-Russia Relations. Vol. 13, No. 3, 2020.
“Legacies of State Socialism in the Russian History and Literature Curriculum: Secondary Schools, Textbook Wars and State Memory,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. 63, No. 1-2 (2021)
“The Poet, The Peasant and the Nation: Aleksandr Puskin’s ’Skazka o pope i o rabotnike ego Balde’ [Tale of the Priest and of his worker Balda] (1830) in Illustrated Editions 1917-53.” Russian Literature, Vols. 87-89 (Jan.-Apr. 2017): 123-146.
“The Bronze Horseman Rides Again: The Stalinist Reimaging of Alexander Pushkin’s Mednyi vsadnik, 1928-53.” The Russian Review, Vol. 72, No. 1 (January 2013): 24-44.
Megan Swift and Serhy Yekelchyk, Eds. We’re from Jazz: Festschrift in Honour of Nicholas V. Galichenko. Washington, D.C.: New Academia, 2010.
“Bricolage in Bronze: The Bronze Horseman Monument and the Petersburg Text”, in We’re from Jazz: Festschrift in Honour of Nicholas V. Galichenko. Eds. Megan Swift and Serhy Yekelchyk. Washington, D.C.: New Academia, 2010: 5-14.
“The Petersburg Sublime: Alexander Benois and the Bronze Horseman Series (1903-1922)”, Germano-Slavica XVII (2009-10): 3-24.
“Writing and the End of St. Petersburg: Mandelstam’s The Egyptian Stamp”, Slavonica Volume 15, No. 2, 2009: 97-111.
“Writing the Manuscript: Pasternak’s ‘Povest’’ (1929)”, Australian Slavonic and East European Studies Volume 21, Nos. 1-2, 2007: 41-54.
“The Tale and the Novel: Pasternak and the Politics of Genre”, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Volume 49, No. 1-2, 2007: 111-121.
“On Litmontage: Yakhontov’s Petersburg (1927) and Mandelstam’s “Egyptian Stamp” (1928) in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 41, No. 1, 2005, pp. 90-101. (Published by Oxford University Press Journals)
“A Self-Conscious Tale: Pasternak’s Povest’”, in Canadian Slavonic Papers, Volume 42, No. 4, 2000, pp. 481-89.
August 2009. “Assessing Russian Heritage-Learner Success in First Year: Integrating Doukhobor-Community Based Students into the First-Year Classroom”. Conference on Teaching Russian in the Pacific Northwest, 番茄社区.
December 2008. “World on Fire: Alexander Benois and the Bronze Horseman Series (1903-22). Annual Convention of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, San Francisco, California.
May 2008. “Revolution As Spectacle: Alexander Benois and the Bronze Horseman Series (1903-22)”. Annual Convention of the Canadian Association of Slavists, University of British Columbia.