Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures

My research is comparative and historical. I’m curious about many different things. I’ve published essays, scholarly monographs, scholarly translations, and artistic translations of prose and poetry from three languages primarily (Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Italian, and Russian). I’ve also done a lot of editing of other people’s works, including translations from French, German, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Korean, and Japanese. There turned out to be a pattern in my two decades or so of BCS and Italian translations—they were mostly focused on the Adriatic. And so, in recent years I’ve been writing about the Adriatic as a translation zone. The in-progress book, Sea of Intimacy: the Adriatic Real and Imagined, has been supported by a US Fulbright Scholar award to Croatia (2024-25) and an IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship (2025-26). I’ve also been experimenting with AI and translation, and writing and speaking about this in a variety of venues. You can find samples here.

My most recent publications include the scholarly translation—with an introduction and critical notes—of Vladimir Propp’s Historical Roots of the Wondertale, with Miriam Shrager and Sibelan Forrester (IU Press 2025); the translation of Miljenko Jergović’s mammoth family saga Kin (Archipelago Books 2021), which was supported by both an NEA literature fellowship and a PEN-Heim award, and which won the 2023 AATSEEL award for best translation into English. I also recently published the essay “Loving Russia” in The Massachusetts Review (Vol. 64, Issue 2, Summer 2023), in which I attempted to exorcise some of the Slavic field’s most pernicious demons.

Otherwise, my reviews, essays, short fiction, poetry, and translations have appeared in a wide variety of literary magazines and scholarly journals, including the New York Times, the Harvard Review, Slavic Review, Words Without Borders, Defunct, and the Buenos Aires Review. From 2009 to 2013 I served as editor-in-chief at The Iowa Review, and there are editor’s notes and framing materials floating around the Internet from many of those issues. I am also the founder of and senior editor at Autumn Hill Books, recipient of NEA literature fellowships for translation in prose (2002), poetry (2010), and again prose (2016). I served as president of the American Literary Translators Association from 2013 to 2016. In 2022, I served as a juror for the National Book Awards in the translated literature category.