Samuel Page
I study Yiddish and Russian literature from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as the novel and literary theory more broadly.
In my dissertation, "Mere Imitation: Orality and Ethnographic Salvage in Yiddish and Russian Literary Modernism, 1890-1930," I bring together writers from these two co-territorial traditions to show how ideas of cultural preservation and salvage were powerful drivers of modernist narrative, running parallel to more familiar facets of Eastern European literary modernism like parody, rejection, and resurrection. While Futurists called for the previous century's writers to be "thrown off the steamship of modernity" and literary theorists inquired into the ways in which the "living word" dies once written into text, I analyze a number of prose works from 1890-1930 which respond to forces like assimilation, modernization, and outright violence with imitation as a robust aesthetic strategy and situate it within discourses from ethnography and folklore studies.
I also love teaching. At Stanford and in community centers I have designed introductory language courses in Russian and Yiddish, and as a Teaching Assistant I have taught nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian and Yiddish literature. I am also enthusiastic about academic writing education and training for the humanities.
At Stanford I have organized several reading and working groups, including the Leyenkrayz (Yiddish reading group) and the Slavic department's Kruzhok (graduate peer writing workshop).
My undergraduate education was in Comparative Literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles. In between that degree and Stanford, I taught English language and American literature courses in Elabuga (a small town in central Tatarstan) through the Fulbright program (2019-2020).
Peer-reviewed:
“Warsaw Folklorism’s ‘Fateful Transition’: Salvage, Urban Migration, and Basha’s Fate in God of Vengeance,” Prooftexts (forthcoming).
Public-facing research and writing:
(Photo credit: Hayley Stoddard)