Book Panel. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: A Reader’s Guide
The Harriman Institute, together with the North American Dostoevsky Society and Academic Studies Press, will host a roundtable discussion to celebrate the publication of Deborah Martinsen’s Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: A Reader’s Guide (2022). With speakers Katherine Bowers (University of British Columbia), Erica Drennan (Barnard College), Kate Holland (University of Toronto), Greta Matzner-Gore (University of Southern California), Ronald Meyer(Harriman Institute), and Marcia Morris (Georgetown University).
Deborah Martinsen (1954–2021), beloved teacher, valuable mentor, and cherished friend and colleague, earned her Ph.D. at Columbia, after which she stayed on at her alma mater to hold the positions of Adjunct Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature, Associate Dean of Alumni Education, Columbia College, and faculty member of the Harriman Institute.
Deborah was past president of the International Dostoevsky Society and executive secretary of the North American Dostoevsky Society. Her many book publications include Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky’s Liars and Narrative Exposure (OSU Narrative Series, 2003) and Dostoevsky in Context (Cambridge, 2016), co-edited with Olga Mairova. Although known primarily for expertise as a Dostoevsky scholar, she also did amazing things when she ventured outside of her specialty; for example, in 2016, she received the Donald Barton Johnson Award for best essay published in Nabokov Studies that year: “Lolita as Petersburg Text.”
Deborah worked on completing two book manuscripts during the past year. Her Reader’s Guide, published by Academic Studies Press in February 2022, builds on her decades of teaching Dostoevsky’s novel in the Columbia Core and teaching others how to teach the novel. The second book, A Very Short Introduction to Dostoevsky, will be published by Oxford University Press.
Read the appreciations of Deborah’s life and scholarship published on the websites of the Columbia Slavic Department and the International Dostoevsky Society.