Faculty

Profile

Director of Jewish Culture (Minor)

VAL VINOKUR has been published in such venues as Common Knowledge, The Boston Review, McSweeney's, Tablet, LitHub, The Russian Review, Zeek, The Massachusetts Review, Journal of Religion and Society, The Literary Review, and New American Writing. His book, The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas, was published by Northwestern University Press and was a finalist for the 2009 AATSEEL Award for Best Book in Literary/Cultural Studies. He has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in support of his and Rose-Myriam Réjouis' translation of Marie Vieux-Chauvet's trilogy Amour, Colere et Folie -- a lost classic of Haitian literature -- for Random House Modern Library (2009). Rejouis and Vinokur have also translated two novels by Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo Magnificent and Texaco (Pantheon Books, 1997). His translation of Isaac Babel’s stories was published in 2017 by Northwestern University Press. He is the founding editor of Poets & Traitors Press and is the author of Relative Genitive: Poems, with Translations from Osip Mandelstam and Vladimir Mayakovsky. 

Degrees Held

PhD, Princeton University (Comparative Literature)
BA, Amherst College (summa cum laude in English/Russian, magna cum laude in Political Science)

Recent Publications

•  Relative Genitive: Poems, with Translations from Osip Mandelstam and Vladimir Mayakovsky (Poets & Traitors Press, 2018)

•  The Essential Fictions, by Isaac Babel, annotated translation with preface (Northwestern University Press, 2018).

•  The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas (Northwestern University Press, 2008) 

•  Love, Anger, Madness, translation with Rose Réjouis of a three novellas by Marie Vieux-Chauvet (Modern Library, 2009)

• "My First Bible" (2022) and "Fathers and Teachers" (2023) in Tablet.

•  Publications in Public Seminar.

• "Dostoevsky's Demonologies of Terror," Tablet Magazine (2020)

•  "Two Iconic, Poets, the Couch They Shared, and Me: Val Vinokur writes Poems Between Poems," LitHub (2019).

""Ekphrasis and Collaboration in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Joe Wright's" (with Rose Réjouis) in Tolstoy Studies Journal Special Issue, Anna Karenina for the Twenty First Century, edited by Ani Kokobobo and Emma Lieber (2016).

•  LitHub Interview on Isaac Babel with David Novack (2016)

•  "The Russians Came!" The Boston Review (2014)

• "The Art and Science of Translating Isaac Babel," The Odessa Review (2016)

•  "Russian Existentialism, or Existential Russianism,” in Situating Existentialism, ed. Judaken and Bernasconi (Columbia University Press 2012) 

•  Verse translations in Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky, ed. Michael Almereyda (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008). Listen here [autoplay].

•  "Levinas Underground: Dostoyevsky, "De L'evasion," and the Devil,” Levinas Studies vol 5 (2010)

•  "Roth, Babel, and a Question of Blood," Zeek (2008)

•  "Your Worship," The Boston Review (2007)

•  "New Jews from the Old Country,” The Boston Review Feb-March 2005.

•  "Morality and Orality in Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry," The Massachusetts Review Winter 2005.

•  "On the Brink of Tears and Laughter: The Uses of Joy and Suffering in Levinas’s Thought,” (PDF) The Journal of Religion and Society 6, 2004.

•  "Levinas’s Dostoevsky," Common Knowledge, Spring 2003.

•  "Talking Fiction: What is Russian Skaz?" McSweeney’s, Fall 2002.

•  "The End of Consciousness and the Ends of Consciousness:  A Reading of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and Demons after Levinas," The Russian Review, January, 2000.

Performances and Appearances

Dostoevsky Day Celebration 2020

Apexart reading series: "Fun" 2019

NYU Jordan Center: Isaac Babel, 2018

Research Interests

19th and 20th century Russian Literature, Dostoevsky, Jewish Studies, Modern Jewish Thought, Literary Translation, Literature and Ethics, Poetry.

Awards And Honors

• Guggenheim Fellowship, 2008
• Finalist, AATSEEL Award for Best Book in Literary/Cultural Studies, 2009
• Poetry Finalist for Best Translated Book of the Year, University of Rochester / three percent (for Night Wraps the Sky), 2008
• Semi-finalist, “Discovery”/ The Nation poetry contest, 2002
• 2nd Prize in Poetry, Summer Literary Seminars (Petersburg, Russia) Writing Contest, 2001
• Center for the Study of Religion Dissertation Award, Princeton University, 2000
• American Translators Association Lewis Galantière Prize for Best Book (for Texaco), 1998