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The North American Dostoevsky Society is delighted to announce that the special Deborah A. Martinsen Travel Award to support travel to the XIX International Dostoevsky Symposium in Buenos Aires has been granted to five recipients: Victoria Juharyan, Jiwon Jung, Elizaveta Shershneva, Ekaterina Tarasova, and Shudi Yang.
Victoria Juharyan teaches literature and philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Victoria completed her PhD in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University in 2018. She also holds an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College and a BA in Literary Editing from St. Petersburg State University in Russia. She is currently completing a manuscript titled The Cognitive Value of Love in Tolstoy: A Study in Aesthetics and is working on two other long-term projects: one on Hegel’s influence on Russian literature and the other on the eighteenth-century Ukrainian philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda. In addition to these projects, Victoria is developing a theatrical and musical adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Netochka Nezvanova (1849). She is very grateful to be presenting her paper – “From Prose to Performance: Dostoevsky Beyond the Page on Screen and Stage” – with the support of the special Deborah A. Martinsen Travel Award at the XIX IDS Symposium in Buenos Aires. Victoria recalls with fondness Deborah A. Martinsen’s kindness and support of her work on Dostoevsky.
Jiwon Jung is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. Her dissertation explores how Dostoevsky’s characters use and inhabit language across his major works, examining the tension between authentic and borrowed expression. Through what she calls “poetic prosaics,” her research illuminates the ethical and creative dimensions of everyday speech in Dostoevsky’s novels. Her paper title for the XIX IDS Symposium is “‘You Speak Like a Book’: Language, Agency, and Self-Creation in Notes from Underground.”
Elizaveta Shershneva was born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia. After high school, she studied philology at the Higher School of Economics, specializing in Russian literature. After completing her Master’s degree, she was accepted to the Department of Slavic & East European Languages & Cultures of the University of Toronto, where she is now a 3rd-year doctoral student. At the XIX IDS Symposium, she will give a paper entitled “Losing faith in glasnost’: government and journalism from Crime and Punishment to The Brothers Karamazov.”
Ekaterina Tarasova is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and a member of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate Program at the University of Southern California. Her research examines early Russian and Soviet cinema and literature, focusing on co-authorship, censorship, and the transnational circulation and reception of Soviet cultural works. At the XIX IDS Symposium, she will deliver a paper entitled “The Early Soviet Reframing of Dostoevsky’s Legacy in the Biopic The House of the Dead (Mertvyi Dom).”
Shudi Yang is a PhD student in the Slavic department at UC Berkeley. She is the author of “‘Well, go, love Ivan!’: Ivan Karamazov unveiled and the ‘Pro and Contra’ debate revisited” (Studies in East European Thought, 2025). She is currently working on the Smerdyakov question in Brothers Karamazov; besides Dostoevsky, her current research also includes the reception of classical antiquity in Slavic literatures. She will present “Smerdyakov’s Murder Weapon and Dostoevsky’s Mistake” at the XIX IDS Symposium.