Dr. Jason Merrill

Biography

Jason Merrill is a Professor of Russian at Michigan State University and has served as the Director of the Middlebury College Kathryn Wasserman School of Russian since 2010. He teaches Russian language, Russian literature translation, and Russian cinema, and surveys East European literature and film. Following his academic career at Dartmouth College and Drew University, he continues to focus his literary research on the Russian Symbolist author Fedor Sologub within the context of the Symbolist movement, examining questions of influence, plagiarism, and intertextuality in the works of this period. He has published articles on Sologub in journals such as Russkaia literatura, the Slavic East European Journal, and the Russian Literature journal, as well as contributed to collections. Merrill has also published on aspects of Russian cinema in Studies in Russian Soviet Cinema and worked on language pedagogy through the Russian Language Journal. He co-authored Russian-language textbooks such as Animation Russian Conversation (Focus, 2008) and Russian Folktales: Student Reader (2001, edition 2016), and co-edited the collection Art Teaching Russian (Georgetown 2020), which is a special volume of the Russian Language Journal dedicated to teaching Russian during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is currently working on a biography of Fedor Sologub.

Research Interests