Russian and East European Studies
Assistant Professor of Russian and East European Studies
Undergraduate Chair
Ph.D., Stanford University, Slavic Languages and Literatures
M.A., Stanford University, Japanese
B.A., Williams College, Linguistics
Dr. Kim is on leave in Fall 2024.
D. Brian Kim is a specialist in Russian literature of the long nineteenth century, translation studies, and literary and cultural relationships between Russia, Western Europe, and East Asia.
Dr. Kim's research broadly asks how Russians viewed and engaged in communication across languages and cultures throughout history, both within the Russian Empire and beyond its borders, and what factors motivated writers, translators, and lexicographers as they pursued their work in transnational contexts. His current book project examines the cultures, practices, and ideologies of multilingualism in imperial Russia, focusing on the interplay between literature and education to investigate a national imaginary that sought to valorize foreign languages as a way to bridge various cultural gaps between Russia and points beyond.
At Penn, Dr. Kim regularly offers courses on nineteenth-century Russian literary and cultural history, including seminars on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, as well as occasional seminars on such topics as Russian identity and its permutations in historical context, and the history and sociology of reading in imperial Russia.
You can read more about his undergraduate course, “Russia and the West,” in the spring/summer 2023 issue of Omnia.
Office Location
Selected Publications
“Konstantin Bal’mont, Japan, and the Poetics of Impressionability.” Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 65, no. 4, 2021, pp. 741-760.
“Locating Russia Between East and West.” Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 65, no. 4, 2021, pp. 714-720.
“Foreign Interests: Nineteenth-Century Lexicography in Russia and Japan.” The Whole World in a Book: Dictionaries in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Sarah Ogilvie and Gabriella Safran, Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 17-33.
“Seduction, Subterfuge, Subversion: Ivan Krylov’s Rewriting of Molière.” French and Russian in Imperial Russia: Language Attitudes and Identity, edited by Derek Offord, Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, Vladislav Rjéoutski, and Gesine Argent, Edinburgh University Press, 2015, pp. 139-155.
Affiliations
Graduate Group, Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory
Affiliated Faculty, Asian American Studies Program and James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies
