Professor Margaret Litvin on Arab-Russian Cultural Ties and What’s Unusual about WLL
Professor Margaret Litvin returns to BU this fall from a year as a Frederick S. Burkhardt Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden. She’ll be serving as Associate Chair of WLL this year, after which she will be off again to Germany to take up an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship.
In a recent interview, she describes her project on the rich history of literary and cultural exchange between the Arab world and Russia. And she gives a shout-out to WLL:
“Finally I should mention my department at Boston University, because it’s an unusual place. We are called World Languages and Literatures and we teach ten languages and their literatures: German, Russian, Hindi-Urdu, three East Asian, and four Middle Eastern. Some of my closest colleagues do things like Japanese! But most of us somehow work on translation or literary flows. Our conversations in the hallway are amazing – it’s like a Silk Road of ideas. Not only have we “provincialized Europe” by putting our department’s center of gravity so far east. We have also avoided (so far) some of the other provincialisms and perhaps tensions that can grow in departments organized around a single region, and some of the methodological gaps of ‘World Literature’ in the singular.”