D. Brian Kim

Research Interests

D. Brian Kim holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Stanford University, where he also received an M.A. in Japanese; he completed his B.A. in linguistics at Williams College. He is a specialist in Russian literature of the long nineteenth century, translation studies, and literary and cultural relationships between Russia, Western Europe, and East Asia.
 
Dr. Kim's research broadly asks how Russians viewed and engaged in communication across languages and cultures throughout history, both within the Russian Empire and beyond its borders, and what factors motivated writers, translators, and lexicographers as they pursued their work in transnational contexts. His current book project examines the cultures, practices, and ideologies of polylingualism in imperial Russia, focusing on the interplay between literature and education to investigate a national imaginary that sought to valorize foreign languages as a way to bridge various cultural gaps between Russia and points beyond.
 
At Penn, Dr. Kim regularly offers courses on nineteenth-century Russian literary and cultural history, including seminars on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, as well as occasional seminars on such topics as Russian identity and its permutations in historical context, and the history and sociology of reading in imperial Russia.