Russell Scott Valentino

Russell Scott Valentino is the Michael Henry Heim Chair in Central and East European Letters at Indiana University, Professor and Chair in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, and Director of The Translation Research Commons (TReCs).

His work has been published by the NY Times, Reaktion Books, The Harvard Review, Yale University Press, and a dozen other literary magazines and book publishers. It has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, the U.S. Departments of State and Education, and other institutions.

Former Editor-in-Chief at The Iowa Review and former President of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), Valentino served on the 2022 jury for the National Book Awards. He is the founder and publisher of Autumn Hill Books and blogs right here at russellv.com.

His translation of Miljenko Jergović’s family saga Kin (Archipelago Books, 2021) received the 2023 Best Prose Translation award from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. His translation (with Miriam Shrager and Sibelan Forrester) of Vladimir Propp’s Historical Roots of the Wondertale was published by Indiana University Press in December, 2025.

He is currently working on two sibling books. One is a cultural history entitled Sea of Intimacy: The Adriatic Real and Imagined. You can find more on the book at Sea of Intimacy — the Book. The other, The Translator after AI: Translation as Practice in an Age of Prediction, puts insights gained from Sea of Intimacy‘s attention to physical experience into contact with the limit cases afforded by AI. More at AI, Translation, and the Translator after AI.

For consultation, collaboration, and speaking invitations, please reach out to him at russellv@iu.edu.

###