Goldberg Awarded American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship

Posted March 30, 2017

Stuart Goldberg, associate professor of Russian in the Ivan Allen College School of Modern Languages, has been awarded a fellowship by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).

ACLS, a private, nonprofit federation of 74 national scholarly organizations founded in 1919, is the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences. The fellowship will support research and writing during 2017 - 2018 for Goldberg’s book project: An Indwelling Voice: Sincerities and Authenticities in Russian Poetry, 1782 - 2001. 

In his study of Russian poetry, Goldberg asks how it is that some poets have been able to inscribe a resonantly sincere voice in their verse. Sincerity, it turns out, is not stable, but culturally-embedded and malleable. It must be generated anew in each new generation of poets, and, in fact, in each audibly “sincere” poem or passage. In his study, Goldberg uses historically contextualized close readings to tease out the poetic devices and pragmatic framings which have allowed poets to inscribe a sincere voice despite the inevitable pitfalls and challenges. Taken together, the readings, spanning approximately 220 years of Russian poetry, demonstrate shifting conceptualizations of sincerity and authenticity and provide new perspective on the evolution of the lyric.

Hearty congratulations to Dr. Goldberg.