Profile

Submitted by Dale E. Peterson on Wednesday, 9/28/2011, at 10:49 AM

Dale E. Peterson, Eliza Clark Folger Professor of English and Russian, has been teaching at Amherst in both departments since 1968.  Trained at Yale in Russian Studies and American Studies, his research and writing have concentrated on comparative studies of Russian-American literary and cultural relations.  He is the author of two books, The Clement Vision: Poetic Realism in Turgenev and James (1975) and Up From Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul (2000), and of numerous articles on Nabokov and Dostoevsky, along with a series of studies of American-Russian literary dialogues. In the English curriculum, his courses tend to focus on genre studies, particularly on rather unusual experiments in narrative form (“The Modern Short Story Sequence’) or fictional voice (“The Literature of Madness”) or epic scope (“Big Books”).  He also reliably teaches courses in American literature and a seminar on Vladimir Nabokov.