Thomas Seifrid, a leading scholar of Russian literature and cultural studies, will present a University Lecture April 6 at 3 p.m. in the Guerlac Room in the A.D. White House.
The title of Seifrid's lecture will be "Roman Jakobson's Structural Myth," and it is free and open to the public. It is part of a two-day conference at Cornell in memory of Seifrid's mentor, George Gibian, the late professor of Russian and comparative literature, who died in 1999. Seifrid, associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Southern California, received his doctorate in Russian literature at Cornell in 1984, with a dissertation written under Gibian's direction.
Having studied at Cornell in the fields of Russian literature and history and Slavic linguistics, his dissertation on the fiction of a master of socialist realism, Andrei Platonov, was subsequently published in revised and augmented form in 1992 by Cambridge University Press as Andrei Platonov: Uncertainties of Spirit. It was one of five finalists for the annual Scholarly Book Award of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages.
Seifrid's current major book-length project focuses on Russian philosophies of language from 1850 to 1950 and particularly on ways in which the latter stimulated other broader concerns in philosophy, theology, linguistics and poetry. One of the key figures in Seifrid's project is Jakobson (1896-1982), the highly influential theorist of the Prague Linguistic Circle.
A graduate of the University of Montana (1978) with a B.S., Seifrid earned his both his M.A. (in 1981 in Slavic studies) and his Ph.D. at Cornell.
University Lecturers are selected from nominations made to the University Lectures Committee, which is composed of faculty and students.
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