About…

I have been flippant and irreverent about “about” in the past, but now I’m serious! Welcome to the russellv.com website. You can find my official Indiana University faculty bio at this link. But since the IU websites have been, let’s say, inconstant of late, here’s a basic bio in the third-person per the genre norms:

Russell Scott Valentino is a professor in the department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures and the Department of Comparative Literature at Indiana University Bloomington. 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; and supported by the NEH, the NEA, PEN American, and the U.S. Departments of State and Education. 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 at russellv.com. His translation of Miljenko Jergovic’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 is due out from Indiana University Press in September, 2025.

My most recent translation was a very long, very good book by Miljenko Jergović, which was published by Archipelago Books in 2021.

I wrote one scholarly monograph (published in 2000) based on my PhD dissertation, and a second, published in 2014 as The Woman in the Window. I have also translated books by Igor Štiks (with Tomislav Kuzmanović), Predrag Matvejević (this one and this other one), Sabit Madaliev, Carlo Michelstaedter (with Cinzia Blum and David Depew), and Susanna Tamaro (again with Cinzia Blum).

Esther Allen, Sean Cotter, and I edited a book devoted to the life and work of Michael Henry Heim (Open Letter Books), which came out in the fall of 2014. It’s called The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim and a Life in Translation, and here’s the listing at the publisher’s website.

The Woman in the Window was long listed for the Historia Nova Prize for the Best Book on Russian Intellectual and Cultural History (for 2014), alongside a number of other really fantastic books published in the same year. It came out in paperback in 2016.

Here are a few relatively short pieces that are easy to find online:

• Good Enough for Jesus
• The Oxymoron of Empathic Criticism
• Teaching in Translation
• Translation and Proficiency Language Teaching
• Translation and the Teaching of Literature
• A Translator’s Dilemma
• Crossing
• Crossing 2
• Crossing 3
• Crossed
• Lenin’s Empty Place
• Pierre Menard’s Alexander Blok
• Menard’s Khlebnikov
• Me Bastard, You Bastard: Multiculturalism at Home and Abroad