Grace Clifford
Grace came to her interest in Russian literature by way of an undergraduate major in classics at Columbia University. As a result, her primary focus is on the literary and political reception of Greco-Roman antiquity in 19th century Russian prose. She is particularly interested in contrasting the employment of classical reception in Russian versus western nationalist narratives of the same era. She is also interested in how the religious history of Europe is shaped by the divergence of Latin and Greek as liturgical languages; as well as narrative, genre, embodiment, psychoanalysis, and materiality. The first of her two undergraduate theses focused on the convergence of Andrei Bolkonsky’s body with the narrative structure of War and Peace; and the other wove a comparison of the trial scenes as embedded in the narrative structure of The Brothers Karamazov and Aeschylus’ Oresteia together with a Freudian assessment of inclusion and exclusion in the Karamazov family.