Dominick Lawton
Dominick Lawton researches and teaches the literature, cultural history, and intellectual history of Russia and the former Yugoslavia, particularly from the twentieth century. His current book project, provisionally titled Writing Rebellious Things: Objects, Materialism, and Poetics in the Literature of the Russian Revolution, examines the volatile status of material objects and commodities during the transition from capitalism to socialism as a productive social and aesthetic problem for early 20th century Russian literature, generating new experiments with literary form.
Lawton is working on a second book-length project about literary and cinematic responses to the transformation of domestic space in Russia and the Balkans, both during and after the socialist period. His research has been supported with grants from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley.
He currently serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for Slavic Languages and Literatures.
Recent Publications
"Apartment Questions: Mikhail Bulgakov's Literary Kommunalka, From Theme to Form," in Slavic and East European Journal 67.2 (Summer 2023) 201-219.
"Comintern Aesthetics: Between Politics and Culture," in Comintern Aesthetics, eds. Amelia M. Glaser and Steven S. Lee (Toronto: U. of Toronto Press, 2020) xiii-xxi.
in L2 Journal 13.1 (2021) 104-107.
Review of Sergei Tretyakov, I Want a Baby and Other Plays, trans. Robert Leach and Stephen Holland, in DELOS: A Journal of Translation and World Literature 36.2 (Fall 2021) 298-303.
Articles in Progress
"Uneven Form, Combined History: Dialectics of Development in Shklovsky and Trotsky." Forthcoming for special issue of Comparative Literature on "Second Worldism: Geography, Comparison, Form," June 2026.
"Throwing Stones in the Russian Enlightenment: Lomonosov on Glass." Forthcoming for edited volume Fragile Things: Material Culture and the Russian Empire.
Recorded Talks
Sorbonne University, Paris, March 2024 (on Zoom).
Selected Recent Courses
- "Yugoslavia and the Literature of Freedom" (Fall 2024)
- "Get Your Own Toothbrush: Experiments in Communal Housing and their Discontents" (Fall 2024)
- "Eighteenth Century Russian Literature" (Spring 2024)
- "Dissent and Protest in Post-Soviet Spaces" (Winter 2024, co-taught with Yuliya Ilchuk)
- "The Great Russian Novel: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and More" (Winter 2024)
- "Modern Russian Literature and Culture: The Age of War and Revolution" (Spring 2023)
- "Literature at War: From Yugoslavia to Ukraine" (Spring 2023)
- "Russian & East European Literary Theory: Formalism, Bakhtin, and Beyond" (Fall 2022)