Dr. Megan Swift
Position
Contact
Credentials
PhD (U of Toronto)
Area of expertise
Slavic studies
I first visited Russia on a high school trip in 1989, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. Since then I have become a specialist in Russian literature, art and culture, earning my PhD from the University of Toronto in 2002.
I teach classes that focus on the defining events of Russian political history – Culture of the Russian Revolution.
I am the co-editor for Literature for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (2016) and have published articles in leading North American and European journals that focus on Russian modernist writing and the transition from modernist to socialist realist aesthetics.
My current book project focuses on illustrated children’s literature under Lenin and Stalin and inspired my course on magic and the Russian fairytale world. I held the Eileen Wallace Fellowship in Children’s Literature for two years, in 2012-13 and 2013-14.
My work as a Russian language teacher led to the creation of the bi-annual Teaching Russian conference, and I was the President of the Canadian Association of Slavists from 2010-2014 and remain an active member of the CAS executive.
Guest editor. Canadian Journal of Eurasian and Russian Studies. Special Issue on Canada-Russia Relations. Vol. 13, No. 3, 2020.
“Legacies of State Socialism in the Russian History and Literature Curriculum: Secondary Schools, Textbook Wars and State Memory,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. 63, No. 1-2 (2021)
“The Poet, The Peasant and the Nation: Aleksandr Puskin’s ’Skazka o pope i o rabotnike ego Balde’ [Tale of the Priest and of his worker Balda] (1830) in Illustrated Editions 1917-53.” Russian Literature, Vols. 87-89 (Jan.-Apr. 2017): 123-146.
“The Bronze Horseman Rides Again: The Stalinist Reimaging of Alexander Pushkin’s Mednyi vsadnik, 1928-53.” The Russian Review, Vol. 72, No. 1 (January 2013): 24-44.
Megan Swift and Serhy Yekelchyk, Eds. We’re from Jazz: Festschrift in Honour of Nicholas V. Galichenko. Washington, D.C.: New Academia, 2010.
“Bricolage in Bronze: The Bronze Horseman Monument and the Petersburg Text”, in We’re from Jazz: Festschrift in Honour of Nicholas V. Galichenko. Eds. Megan Swift and Serhy Yekelchyk. Washington, D.C.: New Academia, 2010: 5-14.
“The Petersburg Sublime: Alexander Benois and the Bronze Horseman Series (1903-1922)”, Germano-Slavica XVII (2009-10): 3-24.
“Writing and the End of St. Petersburg: Mandelstam’s The Egyptian Stamp”, Slavonica Volume 15, No. 2, 2009: 97-111.
“Writing the Manuscript: Pasternak’s ‘Povest’’ (1929)”, Australian Slavonic and East European Studies Volume 21, Nos. 1-2, 2007: 41-54.
“The Tale and the Novel: Pasternak and the Politics of Genre”, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Volume 49, No. 1-2, 2007: 111-121.
“On Litmontage: Yakhontov’s Petersburg (1927) and Mandelstam’s “Egyptian Stamp” (1928) in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 41, No. 1, 2005, pp. 90-101. (Published by Oxford University Press Journals)
“A Self-Conscious Tale: Pasternak’s Povest’”, in Canadian Slavonic Papers, Volume 42, No. 4, 2000, pp. 481-89.
August 2009. “Assessing Russian Heritage-Learner Success in First Year: Integrating Doukhobor-Community Based Students into the First-Year Classroom”. Conference on Teaching Russian in the Pacific Northwest, University of Victoria.
December 2008. “World on Fire: Alexander Benois and the Bronze Horseman Series (1903-22). Annual Convention of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, San Francisco, California.
May 2008. “Revolution As Spectacle: Alexander Benois and the Bronze Horseman Series (1903-22)”. Annual Convention of the Canadian Association of Slavists, University of British Columbia.