Ilya Yurievich Vinitskii - I received my diploma in teaching Russian Language and Literature at Moscow State Pedagogical University in 1991, my Ph.D. (Kandidat filologicheskikh nauk) in Russian Literature at Moscow State Pedagogical University in 1995, and received my PhD habilitation (Doktor filologicheskikh nauk) in 2005.

My main fields of expertise are nineteenth-century Russian literature and intellectual history. At the University of Pennsylvania, I teach courses focusing on literary, ideological, religious, and political issues, including “Madness and Madmen in Russian Culture,” “From the Other Shore: Russia and the West,” and “The Haunted House: Russian Realism in European Context.” My most recent books are “Ghostly Paradoxes: Modern Spiritualism and Russian Culture in the Age of Realism” (University of Toronto Press; forthcoming); “Interpreter’s House: Poetic Semantics and Historical Imagination of Vassily Zhukovsky” (NLO, 2006, in Russian), a collection, “Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture” (Toronto University Press 2007; co-edited with Angela Brintlinger), and “A Cultural History of Russian Literature” (Polity Press, UK, 2009; co-authored with Andrew Baruch Wachtel).