Research Interests:
Twentieth-century Russian literature, particularly the 1920's and 1930's; definitions of individual and national identity; how writers made sense—and art—of the radical reshaping of society following the Bolshevik Revolution; the fiction of Isaac Babel (1894-1940) and the transformations of his time.
Honors/Awards (selected):
Adjunct Fellow, University of Pennsylvania Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, 2002-2003.
Fellow, Northwestern University Center for the Humanities, 1993-94
Publications:
Books:
Isaac Babel, 1920 Diary, edited and with an introduction and notes by Carol J. Avins, trans. H.T. Willetts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
Border Crossings: The West and Russian Identity in Soviet Literature, 1917-1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
Articles and book chapters (selected):
“Isaac Babel and the Jewish Experience of Revolution,” in The Enigma of Isaac Babel, ed. Gregory Freidin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 82-99.
"Isaac Babel's Tales of Collectivization: Rites of Transition in the New Soviet Village," Slavic Review 64, no.3 (Fall 2005)
"Jewish Ritual and Soviet Context in Two Stories of Isaac Babel," in American Contributions to the Twelfth International Congress of Slavists, Cracow, August-September 1998, ed. Robert A. Maguire and Alan Timber lake (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 1998), 11-20.
"Yurii Zhivago's Readers: Literary Reception in Pasternak's Novel and in His Time," in Freedom and Responsibility in Russian Literature, ed. Elizabeth Cheresh Allen and Gary Saul Morson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press and The Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1995), 213-20. Reprinted in slightly different form in Doctor Zhivago: A Critical Companion, ed. Edith W. Clowes (Evanston: Northwestern University Press and The American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, 1995), 49-61.
"Kinship and Concealment in Red Cavalry and Babel's 1920 Diary,"Slavic Review 53:3 (Fall 1994): 694-710.
"Reaching a Reader: The Master's Audience in The Master and Margarita,” Slavic Review 45 (Summer 1986): 272-85.
"Freedom and Emigration in Two Novels of Milan Kundera," Humanities in Society 7, nos.3-4 (Summer-Fall 1984): 151-60.
Book Translation:
Irina Ratushinskaya, Beyond the Limit, co-translated with Frances Padorr Brent, Translator's Introduction by Carol J. Avins (Evanston, IL.: Northwestern University Press, 1987).
Professional Activities (selected):
Academic Council, Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1992-1996
SSRC-ACLS Review Committee on Soviet Studies, 1990-1991
Advisory Board, Slavic and East European Journal, 1985-1989
Program Committee, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, 1989