Position Title
Assistant Professor
Valeria Mutc (Ph.D., Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale University) is a scholar of nineteenth-century literature. Her current research unites three fields of inquiry: literature, theater, and the history of science and technology in the Russian Empire. In her first book project, The Dramatic Turn: Science, Theater, and Russian Literature, she examines how theater emerged as the optimal medium for Russian writers to address the challenges and opportunities presented by scientific and industrial modernity. Russia's prose writers responded to new labor practices, social taxonomies, and positivist ideologies by experimenting with dramatic writing and infusing dramatic elements into a uniquely functional and aesthetically distinct prose fiction. Zeroing in on such writers as Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, and Maksim Gorky, The Dramatic Turn contends that theater became the ultimate stronghold for the value of fictionality amidst the rising political and social influence of science and the growing dominance of a positivist worldview.
Mutc also pursues public outreach and pedagogy projects aimed at providing opportunities for equitable access to education. Over the past four years, she has developed interactive online resources for learning about theater and has designed and led programming on equitable and inclusive pedagogy.
Mutc’s work on the subject of science and theater has appeared in the Wiener Slawistischer Almanach and the edited volume New Drama in Russia. Before coming to Davis, Mutc served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Society of Fellows at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University.
Academic Appointments
Mellon Teaching Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities, Columbia University (July 2023–June 2024)
Organized Conferences
Plotting Publics: Science, Society, and Literature in Russia and Eastern Europe (Columbia University, Spring 2024)
Science and Literature in Russia and Eastern Europe (Yale University, Spring 2023)
- Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale University
- Master of Studies in Modern Languages, University of Oxford
- Russian literature and culture of the long 19th century
- Russian drama from the 18th century to the present
- theory of the novel and realism
- history of science and technology
- history of capitalism
- “The Acts of Teaching: Pedagogical Psychology in Leo Tolstoy’s Aesthetics.” Part of a Special Issue "Literature and Psychiatry in Late Russian Empire"(eds. Giulia Dossi and Riccardo Nicolosi)Article. The Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 89 (2023): 1–30
- "Absence on Stage in Ivan Vyrypaev’s July." In New Drama in Russian: Performance, Politics and Protest in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, edited by J.A.E. Curtis, 109- 17. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.