Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian
Education:
Office: 218D Strickland Hall
Phone: 882-2546
Email: kellymartha@missouri.edu
Research
My work centers primarily on three, largely inextricable topics: poetry, ritual and music. In my current book manuscript, “Unorthodox Poetry: Modernist Revisions of Russian Orthodoxy,” I show how poets negotiated Russia’s relation to modernity through re-envisioning traditional religion in their own work. These modernist poets (I investigate Aleksandr Blok, Mikhail Kuzmin, Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak) seek to posit Russia as responding uniquely to modernity’s strains, offering an unorthodox religious-poetic answer. They also present a revised Orthodoxy as the key means to uniting Russia’s westernized educated classes with the vast and (putatively) pious peasant population. In their work poetry becomes a means of forestalling cultural and political crisis. Their versions of Russian Orthodox Christianity, and its liturgy, are as unorthodox as they are rich and imaginative, and their poetry emblematizes the increasingly complex place of religion in modern society.
My second book project steps back a few decades to examine depictions of musical performance in late-nineteenth-century Russian poetry and prose.
Here I explore how literary representations of listening to music relate to contemporaneous and modernist discussions of ways of knowing.
Teaching
I have taught a range of courses at MU, from Russian Civilization (a large lecture course) to small discussion-based courses (“The Russian Poetic Tradition,” “Russian Modernism,” “Tolstoy and Dostoevsky,” “The Russian Novel”) to language courses from first- to third-year. In the spring semester I will be teaching a graduate-level course on religious themes in Russian literature, based on research for a current book project.
Additionally, a number of the materials we have been working with in my modernism class this semester will make their way into a book project I am co-editing with Sibelan Forrester—a companion volume for Silver Age Poetry. In this collection we include not only brief bios and key poems but also manifestoes, correspondence, publicistic writings, memoirs and even visuals from the dizzyingly rich journal culture of the period. What is more, we trace the personal and professional networks that so shaped the conversation that was the Silver Age
In my teaching I frequently incorporate visual culture, encouraging students to draw cross-media comparisons. Film plays some part in practically all the courses I teach. Through reference to visual, verbal and musical compositions, I emphasize the broader cultural movements to which texts respond.
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University of Missouri