POTSDAM -- SUNY Potsdam will welcome National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Visiting Professor Dr. Boris Lanin this semester.

Lanin is a professor and the head of literature at the Russian Academy of Education in Moscow, and will teach in the College's Department of Modern Languages during his visit.

Lanin is set to deliver three public lectures on the theme, "A Russian Rainbow: Various Colors of Soviet and Post-Soviet Life," during his stay.

All lectures will be offered on Thursdays, from 7:30-9 p.m., in the Raymond Hall eighth floor lounge. The schedule is as follows:

Sept. 20: "Creating a New Literary Canon and Reading Culture in Post-Soviet Russia;"

Oct. 18: "Chimps, Chess and Stalin's New Socialist Man;" and

Nov. 15: "Zamyatin and Orwell: Founding Fathers of Modern Russian Anti-Utopian Writing."

About the visiting scholar:

Lanin is a well-known expert in Russian-Jewish literature, and has written important books and articles on the Russian-Jewish writers Grossman, Khazanov, Krymov, Daniel and many others. He was the first to publish a book on the "third wave" Russian emigre writers, including important research on Gorenshtein (the "Jewish Dostoevsky," who died in Berlin in 2002), Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn, and many other prominent writers whose works were prohibited in Soviet times.

Lanin introduced Russian literary studies to the term "anti-utopia," which hadn't been in wide academic use until his doctoral dissertation.

SUNY Potsdam's NEH Faculty Development Program has supported interdisciplinary study and scholarly exchange in the humanities for more than 40 years. To learn more about research and faculty development resources at SUNY Potsdam, visit http://www.potsdam.edu/about/administration/provost.