Anna Schur Wins NEH Grant for Study in St. Petersburg

English Professor Anna Schur has been awarded a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities summer stipend and Whiting fellowship to support eight consecutive weeks of work on her project, “Why Literature Can Reveal What Law Cannot: Tolstoy and Uspensky on the “Hidden Horror” of Modern Life,” and the larger book of which it is a part. NEH summer stipends are among the most competitive humanities grants in the country, with an average funding rate of only eight percent. Dr. Schur also received a summer stipend in 2007.

The fellowship will support Dr. Schur’s travel to St. Petersburg, Russia, where she will research “the rarely discussed 1885 journalistic sketch by the Russian populist writer Gleb Uspensky (1843–1902) ‘One on One.’ Uspensky wrote this sketch in response to the then widely publicized but now forgotten trial of one Vasily Pishchikov,” who brutally murdered his wife. “An examination of Pischikov’s trial and of Uspensky’s response to it will enrich the course on intersections of law and literature that I am planning to offer in the 2015–16 academic year,” Dr. Schur said.

Dr. Schur is creating a year-long “Law and Literature” course, designed to introduce students to this growing subfield of literary study. She plans to teach Uspensky’s essay side by side with Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, a fictional account of a murder of the wife by her husband.