Robert Romanchuk

Pribic Family Associate Professor of Slavic

Ukrainian Studies Fund Research Fellow, Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, Fall 2018

Visiting Scholar, University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Slavic, East European & Eurasian Languages & Cultures, Spring 2019

Robert Romanchuk (Ph.D., Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Los Angeles) is Pribic Family Associate Professor of Slavic in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics. His fields are philology and psychoanalysis.

He researches the so-called "Little Russian" literary milieu out of which the Ukrainian/Russian romantic Nikolai Gogol emerged, and the implication of the Gogolian text in psychoanalytic theory; the culture of obrazovanie (“formation,” including both pedagogy and spiritual direction/psychagogy) and hermeneutics (textual interpretation) in the Orthodox Middle Ages; and the Byzantine epic Digenis Akritis and its medieval Slavic reception.

For his teaching, Prof. Romanchuk has been recognized with an FSU Undergraduate Teaching Award.

Courses Taught

Gogol and Psychoanalytic Theory

Žižek's Politics

Hermeneutics and Rhetoric of Old Rus' Literature

History of the Russian Language

Russian Fairy Tales

The Slavic Vampire

Soviet Russian Cinema

Slavic Culture and Civilization

Selected Publications

• Romanchuk, R. (2018). The Old Slavic Digenis Akritis: Its 'Formulaic Style' and Problems of Its Edition. In Judith D. Kornblatt (ed.), American Contributions to the Sixteenth International Congress of Slavists. Volume 2: Literature (pp. 187-210). Slavica.
• Koropeckyj, R. and Romanchuk, R. (2017). Harkusha the Noble Bandit and the 'Minority' of Little Russian Literature. The Russian Review, 76 (2), 294-310.
• Romanchuk, R. (2016). Mount Athos. In David Wallace (ed.), Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 (vol. 2: pp. 376-402). Oxford University Press.
• Romanchuk, R. (2016). Writing, Reading, and Rhetoric: 'Lettered Education' in Kyivan Rus'. In Frank Sysyn (ed.), Mykhailo Hrushevsky. History of Ukraine-Rus'. Volume 3. To the Year 1340 (pp. 511-524). Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press.
• Romanchuk, R. (2013). Confronting Ukrainian Modernism: Some New and Recent Translations of Poetry. Slavic and East European Journal, 57 (3), 465-475.
• Romanchuk, R. (2010). The Idea of the Heart in Byzantium and the History of the Book. In Orietta Da Rold, & Elaine Treharne (eds.), Textual Cultures: Cultural Texts, 1000-2010 (Essays and Studies 63) (pp. 163-186). Boydell and Brewer.
• Romanchuk, R. (2009). Back to 'Gogol's Retreat From Love': Mirgorod as a Locus of Gogolian Perversion. (Part II: 'Vii.'). Canadian Slavonic Papers, 51 (2-3), 305-331.
• Romanchuk, R. (2007). Byzantine Hermeneutics and Pedagogy in the Russian North: Monks and Masters at the Kirillo-Belozerskii Monastery, 1397-1501. University of Toronto Press.
• De Lossa, R., Koropeckyj, R. R., & Romanchuk, R. (2005). Rozmovljajmo! Let's Talk. A Basic Ukrainian Course with Polylogs, Grammar, and Conversation Lessons. Slavica Publishers at Indiana University.
• Koropeckyj, R., & Romanchuk, R. (2003). Ukraine in Blackface: Performance and Representation in Gogol's Dikan'ka Tales, Book I. Slavic Review, 62 (3), 525-547.

Current Research Projects

• Gogol’s Mirgorod: Four Ways to Write a Perverse Symptom (monograph in progress)
• Nikolai Gogol and “Little Russian Literature” (article series with Roman Koropeckyj, UCLA)
• Hesychasm and the “language arts” at the courts of the Serbian Lazarevići (15^th c.: Konstantin Kostenečki, Nikon Jerusalimac)
• Critical edition of the Slavic Digenis Akritis (Devgenievo deianie)