USC.edu

Colleen McQuillen

Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Colleen McQuillen
Email mcquille@usc.edu

Education

  • Ph.D. Slavic Languages and Literatures, Columbia University, 2006
  • M.A. Slavic Languages and Literatures, Columbia University, 1998
  • B.A. Russian Language and Literature, Amherst College, 1994

  • Summary Statement of Research Interests

    Professor McQuillen is a scholar of Russian modernism who researches the ways that literature extends into, influences, and refracts visual and material culture. Her primary field of research is the period known as the Silver Age, which is the focal point of her first book The Modernist Masquerade: Stylizing Life, Literature and Costumes in Russia. Her current book project, Mining the Earth: Narratives and Natural Resources in Russia at the Fin de Siècle,demonstrates that Russian writers traveling to natural resource extraction zones in the Urals in the 1880s and in Donbas in the 1890s exposed the intertwined scourges of environmental and civilizational decline, which subverted the official rhetoric of progress underpinning the imperial industrial modernization project. 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. She is also interested in Polish modernism, art activism, and theories of creative collaboration.

    Research Keywords

    Modernism, Silver Age, Symbolism, Decadence, Neo-Realism, avant-garde, ecocriticism, environmental studies, posthumanism, art activism, creative collaboration, social network mapping and data visualization, digital humanities.

  • 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.