CATHARINE NEPOMNYASHCHY

NEPOMNYASHCHY--

Catharine. Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Russian Literature and Culture and Chair of the Barnard College Slavic Department, died on March 21. A native of New Jersey, Nepomnyashchy earned a B.A. in Russian Literature and French Literature and an M.A. in French Literature at Brown. She then pursued her Ph.D. in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia. She joined the faculty at Barnard College in 1987. Nepomnyashchy was the first woman to direct the Harriman Institute (2001-2009). She drew academics, writers, chiefs of state, ambassadors, public intellectuals, conceptual artists, dancers, and others to the Institute, and she broadened the geopolitical range to include Central Asia and Georgia and she made it a center of interdisciplinary inquiry. She was honored as the Institute's Alumna of the Year in 2012. Nepomnyashchy was on the Harriman Institute's Executive Committee and its National Advisory Council, and was affiliated with Barnard's Comparative Literature and Human Rights programs. She served as President of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Language (AATSEEL), as well as member of the Kennan Institute's Advisory Council and the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. She chaired the Executive Committee of the Slavic Division of the Modern Language Association. In 2011, she received AATSEEL's Award for Outstanding Service to the Profession. Cathy Nepomnyashchy was a masterful teacher and a curricular visionary. Her regular repertory included all periods of Russian literature and all forms of Russian culture, including popular culture. She collaborated in the classroom with colleagues in history, political science, and human rights. Her intellectual energy was a force of nature. She was an agent of change in the institutions and programs she served, the scholarly fields she pursued, and no less in the hearts and minds of the many people she knew. As a scholar, Cathy Nepomnyashchy's range was broad. She published on Pushkin, on great writers of the Soviet period, on emigre Russian writers, on women writers, on Jane Austen in Russia, on ballet, on popular culture and new media. She is known especially for her work on Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky): "Abram Tertz and the Poetics of Crime" (1995), and a translation with Slava Yastremski of Tertz's "Strolls with Pushkin." She coedited" Under the Skies of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness," a volume that inspired an editorial by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference," another coedited volume, was a landmark in the study of writings by and about women. At the time of her death, Cathy was working on a book entitled? "Nabokov and His Enemies: Terms of Engagement." In each of her books she put a feature of Russian literary life into play in a way that expanded the horizons of her field. She is survived by her daughter Olga Nepomnyashchy, her mother Jo-Anne Theimer, and her brother and sister-in-law James Theimer and Sunnie Noellert. Cathy Nepomnyashchy was a brilliant scholar, thinker, teacher, mentor, and administrator. A memorial service will be held at Columbia University in the fall.