Bio
Victoria Thorstensson received her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University
of Wisconsin–Madison. Her primary research specialty is the nineteenth-century Russian
polemical novel. She writes on Dostoevsky, Leskov, the nihilist countercultural movement, the
culture wars of the nineteenth century, the intersections of literature and science, realism, and
contemporary Qazaqstani culture. She is also interested in translation and language pedagogy.
She is currently working on a book-length study of the Russian conservative novelist Boleslav
Markevich, a book chapter on Dostoevsky and Islam, and a book of translations of the
contemporary Qazaqstani Russophone poet Anuar Duisenbinov (co-translated with Mariya
Deykute).
Her recent publications include “Peacocks and Crows: The Populist Discourse on Progress and
Individual Happiness in the Works of Ivan Kushchevsky and Andrei Osipovich-Novodvorsky” in
Revisiting Russian Radicals; “Petr Boborykin’s ‘Nihilism in Russia: Philosophy or Polemics?’”
in Wiener Slawistischer Almanach; a chapter on Boleslav Markevich and the Russian
conservative response to Darwinism in the edited volume Reading Darwin in Imperial Russia;
and “from Metamorph,” a selection of translated poems by Anuar Duisenbinov, published in
Asymptote.
Before coming to Wake Forest, she taught all levels of Russian language and a variety of courses
on Russian and Russophone literature and culture at Carleton College, where she also served as
Program Director for Carleton’s off-campus program “Russophone Studies in Central Asia.”
Prior to Carleton, she was an assistant professor at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Qazaqstan,
where she taught world and Russian literature. Before that, she taught Russian language,
literature, and culture at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Yale University, the University of
Pennsylvania, and the Kathryn Wasserman Davis School of Russian at Middlebury College.