Colleen McQuillen

Summary Statement of Research Interests

Professor McQuillen is a scholar of Russian modernism who researches literature, cultural history, and visual and material culture from the late 19th to the early 20th century. Her current book project, tentatively titled “Mining the Earth, Fueling Russia’s Literature of Modernization,” argues that Russian works of fiction and creative non-fiction about mining, which are set in the imperial frontiers of the Ural Mountains and the Donets River Basin (in today’s Ukraine), expose a paradox: stories about the local, embodied experiences of ore and coal extraction in these colonized territories portray decline, regression, and exhaustion, i.e., experiences of postponed or failed modernization that contradicted official discourse about mining making Russia modern. Undergirding the contradiction are contrasting attitudes toward Russia’s transition to a fossil fuel platform, a project that propelled industrial modernization and the literature about it.

Her scholarly engagement with the issue of humanity’s relationship to its material environments further finds expression in the volume “The Human Reimagined: Posthumanism in Russia” that she co-edited.

Professor McQuillen has published extensively on Russian literature and culture at the turn of the last century, including her first book “The Modernist Masquerade: Stylizing Life, Literature, and Costumes in Russia” (Wisconsin, 2013). She is also interested in Polish modernism, art activism, and theories of creative collaboration.

Research Keywords

Modernism, ecocriticism, environmental humanities, energy humanities, posthumanism, realisms, symbolism, avant-garde

Book

• McQuillen, C.Mining the Earth: Narratives and Natural Resources in Russia at the Fin de siecle. In Progress.
• McQuillen, Colleen and Julia Vaingurt (Ed.). (2018). The Human Reimagined: Posthumanism in Russia. Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press.
• McQuillen, C. (2013). The Modernist Masquerade: Stylizing Life, Literature, and Costumes in Russia. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Book Chapters

• McQuillen, C. (2018). “Russian Modernist Theatricality and the Practice of ‘Life-Creation’”. A Reader’s Guide to Andrei Bely’s Petersburg. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
• McQuillen, C. (2018). Human Adaptation in Late Soviet Environmental Science Fiction. The Human Reimagined: Posthumanism in Russia pp. 99-113. Academic Studies Press.
• McQuillen, C. (2011). Animating Dostoevsky’s ‘Gentle Spirit’: Piotr Dumala’s Kineaesthetic Palimpsest. The Effect of Palimpsest pp. 49-64. New York: Peter Lang.

Journal Article

• McQuillen, C. (2022). ‘Golos materiia’ Zenkevicha: Paleontologiia v epokhe russkogo modernizma. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. (February 2023)
• McQuillen, C. (2022). The Imperial Underground: Russian Coal Mining Narratives of the Donbas at the Fin de Siècle. Slavic and East European Journal. (Spring 2023)
• McQuillen, C. (2021). Radically Distributed Collaboration: the Russian Modernist Enterprise ‘Contemporary Art’. Modernism/modernity Print Plus Platform.
• McQuillen, C. (2020). The Scorched and Depleted Earth: Terrestrial Decadence in Fin-de-siècle Russia. Russian Literature. Vol. 114-115 (June-July 2020), pp. 23-43.
• McQuillen, C. (2018). Deviantnoe povedenie: The Graffiti Collective Zachem’s Social and Artistic Practices. Russian Literature. Vol. 96-98C, pp. 329-350.