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Miami professor editor of Preserving Petersburg

08/21/2008

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Preserving Petersburg

Stephen M. Norris, Miami associate professor of history, is editor of Preserving Petersburg: History, Memory, Nostalgia, recently published by Indiana University Press. Helena Goscilo, professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Pittsburgh, is co-editor. Norris also is author of one of nine essays in the book, "Strolls Through Postmodern Petersburg: Celebrating the City in 2003."

Reviewers have praised Preserving Petersburg as "an interesting and important contribution to existing scholarship on St. Petersburg's myth, cult and text" and "a truly innovative contribution to the scholarship on Petersburg."

St. Petersburg, founded in 1703 by Peter the Great, is considered Russia's most mythologized city. Like a museum piece, it is a site for preservation, a literal and imaginative place where Russians can commune with an idealized past. Essays in Preserving Petersburg trace a process of preservation that stretches back nearly three centuries as manifest in the works of noted historians, poets, novelists, artists, architects, filmmakers and dramatists.

Norris explains the essays in the volume came out of a yearlong focus on St. Petersburg at Miami in 2002-03 to coincide with the 300th birthday of the city. "The Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies sponsored the focus and brought all of the people who wrote essays for the volume, and more, to campus to give talks in a symposium, public lectures at the art museum or to participate in our weekly lecture series," says Norris. He wrote his essay "after I went to St. Petersburg for the tercentenary celebrations."

Norris joined the Miami faculty in 2002 and also is director of Miami's film studies program. He is author of A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812-1945 and editor, with Zara Torlone, of Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema.