Currently Professor and Head, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Professor, World and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I received the Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1985. I have published three books: Dostoevsky's Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford, 1992), Russia's Legal Fictions (Michigan, 1998, the recipient of the MLA Scaglione Prize for a work in Slavic Studies in 1999), and Identify Theft: The Jew in Imperial Russia and the Case of Avraam Uri Kovner (Stanford, 2003). My research interests include Yiddish literature, literary theory, and law and literature. I am currently working on a study of Jewish literature and culture in 20th Century Russia, tentatively titled Russia and the Jews: Language, Race, and Nation, for which I have received a Mellon fellowship from the University of Illinois.