Sibelan Forrester

My Brilliant Career

The Russian Program at Swarthmore College -- my wonderful colleagues this spring are Michael Pesenson, Boris Briker, Jill Neuendorf and Marina Rojavin.

Research and Teaching Interests:

• Russian Literature, especially:
  • Marina Tsvetaeva
  • Twentieth-century poetry in general
  • Women authors (along with Tsvetaeva)
  • Literary criticism and canon formation
• Slavic and East European Folkore, especially:
  • Folk music and vocal performance; Russian romansy
  • Folk healing
  • Fortune telling
  • Material culture
• South Slavic lit and culture, esp. Croatian and Serbian
• Literary translation, theory and practice
• Creative Writing (Poetry)

Courses I teach or have taught at Swarthmore College:

• Russian 1B Beginning Intensive Russian
• Russian 2B Beginning Intensive Russian
• Russian 3B Intermediate Intensive Russian
• Russian 4B, Advanced Intensive Russian
• Russian 011 (Introduction to Russian Culture)
• Independent Study in Croatian Language
• East European Literature in Translation (Writing Intensive, First-Year Seminar), a fabulous selection of 20th- century writings from Eastern Europe
• Dostoevsky in Translation
• Russian Fairy Tales
• Russian/Lit/Ling 70, Translation Workshop
• Russian 79/LIT 79R Russian Women Writers
• Russian 080/Literature 080R, Literature of Dissent
• Russian 91 (Special Topics)
• Honors Attachment to Women's Studies Capstone
• Russian 103 Seminar: Pushkin and Lermontov
• Russian 108 Seminar: Russian Modernism
• Russian 110 Seminar: Bulgakov
• Russian 111, seminar: Tsvetaeva and Mayakovsky
• Russian 112 Seminar: The Acmeists
• Russian 114 Seminar: Folklore in Russian Literature

In 2002-2003 I was the faculty mentor for the Swarthmore Alumni New York City Book Club, suggesting a list of works that are examples of The Great Russian Novel of Conscience

Information on:

• Studying Russian at Swarthmore
• The Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Swarthmore College

More on my brilliant career:

• Educational History:

  Graduated from Boulder High School (Boulder, Colorado), 1979
  ACTR Summer Program at Pushkin Institute, Moscow, 1982
  A.B. in Russian from Bryn Mawr College, 1983
  Sixth-Year Certificate in Russian Language, Indiana University Summer Workshop in Slavic and East European Languages, 1985
  M.A. in Russian Literature from Indiana University (Bloomington), 1985
  One Year Exchange Program at Zagreb University (then Yugoslavia), 1986-87
  Ph.D. in Russian Literature from Indiana University (Bloomington),1990
  IREX Summer Teachers Exchange Program, Petrozavodsk, Russia, 1995

• Employment History:
  • Professor of Russian, Swarthmore College (2007-present)
  • Associate Professor of Russian, Swarthmore College (1998-2007)
  • Assistant Professor of Russian, Swarthmore College (1994-1998)
  • Assistant Professor of Russian, Oberlin College (1989-1994)
• Languages:

  English: native
  Russian: near-native
  Croatian: used to be near-native
  Bosnian: better than you'd think to look at me
  Serbian: pretty good but little kids laugh at my accent
  French: rusty, but proficient for reading, listening, and ordering in restaurants
  German: just rusty, and mostly jokes
  Macedonian: good passive, esp. LitSpeak
  Ukrainian: always an adventure
  Czech: just enough to interfere with Ukrainian, plus a few folk songs
  Other Slavic languages: a matter of interpreting blur

• Current projects:
  • Continuing a wonderful research project in folk healing and fortunte telling.
  • A translation from Serbian of Milica Micic Dimovska's wonderful novel Mrena.
  • Many other Russian poets and writers cool their heels on the back burner; like Mariia Shkapskaia's description of the souls who nag at her, wanting to be born.

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