Hilde Hoogenboom

A literary historian, Hoogenboom was the Jesse Ball DuPont Fellow at the National Humanities Center and postdoctoral fellow in the Eurasia Program of the Social Sciences Research Council for her book, "Noble Sentiments and the Rise of Russian Novels" (University of Toronto Press, 2018), on the sentimental ideal of duty in noble culture and novels by men and women writers, most of whom were nobles. She is a resident associate 2017–18 at the National Humanities Center for her new project "Noble Rot: Corruption, Civil Society, and Literary Elites in Russia." Co-editor of two collections of essays on Russian women writers, she has written numerous articles on women, including on sentimental novels, Pushkin and Sophie Cottin; Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia; George Sand in Russia; bio-bibliographic compilations of women in Europe; and on Vera Figner and Russian populist revolutionary autobiographies. Her introduction (2017) to Sofia Khvoshchinskaia’s "City Folk and Country Folk" (1863) is the first for a dozen translated women’s novels in the Russian Library series at Columbia University Press. Her research interests include 19th-century literature, sentimentalism and realism, women writers, Catherine the Great, life writing, noble culture, gender, and digital humanities. Besides 19th- and 20th-century Russian literature, she teaches intellectual history, civilization, and theater. "Memoirs of Catherine the Great," a new translation of Catherine the Great’s memoirs from French with a substantial introduction and commentary (Modern Library at Random House, 2005), is the first for which the translators consulted the original manuscripts in her own hand. Catherine’s final memoir (1794) is a political thriller about survival in the succession struggle at the Russian court, and a unique Enlightenment document. Meant for general and specialist readers alike, this book is supported by a grant from the National Humanities Center for research and teaching in the undergraduate classroom.