Jillian Pignataro
Jillian Pignataro studied Russian literature, genre theory, and narratology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, receiving a B.A. in 2016 with Magna Cum Laude honors. After college, she spent a year in Vladimir, Russia, teaching English as a second language. Her primary interests include Russian intellectual history of the 19th century; critical realism; nationalism and the Russian idea; the representations of the West in Russian 18th- and 19th- century travelogues; poetics of nihilistic extremism; and Bakhtin's theory of the novel.