Center for Humanistic Inquiry CHI Salon - Teaching Controversial Texts: Pedagogies for Problem Spots

In "Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century" (Amherst College Press, 2022) eleven teachers of Vladimir Nabokov explain how and why they teach this notoriously difficult, even problematic, writer to the next generations of students. Contributors describe how engaging with Nabokov and his often elusive, sometimes troubling texts have helped them to address urgent questions of power, authority, and identity, and to reimagine the literature classroom as one of shared agency between students, instructors, and the authors they read together.

In this CHI Salon, "Reimagining Nabokov" editors José Vergara and Sara Karpukhin will be joined by Amherst College faculty Chris Grobe in conversation about how “problem spots” in Nabokov and others can be productively harnessed in the classroom. Short presentations will be followed by a discussion with time for Q&A.

Sara Karpukhin is Lecturer in Russian at the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She teaches advanced undergraduate courses in Russian, as well as courses on the history of Russian culture, Vladimir Nabokov, and queer Russian cultures. Some of her essays and short stories appeared in "Tint Journal", the blog of the "Los Angeles Review of Books", and "Ploughshares Blog".

José Vergara is Assistant Professor of Russian on the Myra T. Cooley Lectureship at Bryn Mawr College, where he teaches all eras of Russian culture and specializes in prose of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with an emphasis on experimental works. His first book, "All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature" (2021), examines the reception of Joyce’s fiction among Russian writers from the 1920s to the present day. His writing and interviews can be found in the "Los Angeles Review of Books", "Asymptote", "Words without Borders", "Music & Literature", and "World Literature Today".

Chris Grobe is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at Amherst College. A scholar of performance studies, he teaches courses in dramatic literature, performance theory, and performance culture across media. He is the author of "The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV" (2017). His current research focuses on two areas: performance theory in contemporary politics and the role of ideas, people, and techniques from the arts in the tech industry.

The event is co-sponsored by Amherst College Press and Amherst Center for Russian Culture.