About

Colleen McQuillen is an Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California. She serves as the Department Chair and is involved in the academic leadership of the department. Her role includes overseeing graduate studies and contributing to the department's academic programs. The page indicates her primary affiliation with the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, but does not provide specific details about her research focus, background, or key contributions.

Research topics

• Art
• History
• Literature
• Paleontology
• Physics
• Astronomy
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Art history
• Geology

Selected publications

• Perception of Surroundings: Materiality and Affect in the Russian Kustar Arts Revival

  The Russian Review · 2024-05-18

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Abramtsevo and Talashkino are well known for their handicraft workshops that participated in the revival of Russian folk arts known as kustarnichestvo at the turn of the last century. Typically examined in terms of its stylistic progenitors or as a manifestation of Russia’s nationalist politics, kustarnichestvo can also offer unique insights into how craftspeople and consumers related to their natural and built environments. This article examines the materiality of kustar art objects from two perspectives: first, it turns to forests and woodlands as a source of natural resources and ornamental inspiration; then it tackles narratives about how the resulting neo‐Russian style interiors produced a distinctive kind of affect in their beholders. By showing how human subjects understood themselves to be enmeshed in natural and affective ecologies at the fin de siècle , it argues that a movement thoroughly grounded in materialist concerns paradoxically gave rise to a new understanding of the perceiving subject’s affective experience.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Zenkevich’s “Voice of Matter”: Paleontology in the Era of Modernism

  Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Paleontology
  • Art history
  PublisherDOI

• From the Compilers

  Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Radically Distributed Collaboration: The Russian Modernist Enterprise “Contemporary Art”

  Modernism/Modernity Print Plus · 2021-08-10

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In a lecture entitled “Fairytale about Three Sisters: Painting, Architecture, Sculpture,” influential fin-de-siècle Russian architect and devotee of the art nouveau style Fyodor Shekhtel proposed that, “architecture, painting, and sculpture ought to go hand in hand in friendly collaborative work; this friendship, of course, encompasses equally artists working in furniture,

  PublisherDOI

• The Scorched and Depleted Earth: Terrestrial Decadence in Fin-de-Siecle Russia

  Russian Literature · 2020 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • Philosophy
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia. By Anya Bernstein. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. xv, 270 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Figures. Tables. $75.00, hard bound. $22.00, paper.

  Slavic Review · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia. By Anya Bernstein. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. xv, 270 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Figures. Tables. 22.00, paper. - Volume 79 Issue 4

  PublisherDOI

• The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde by Dassia N. Posner

  Theatre Journal · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde by Dassia N. Posner Colleen McQuillen THE DIRECTOR’S PRISM: E. T. A. HOFFMANN AND THE RUSSIAN THEATRICAL AVANT-GARDE. By Dassia N. Posner. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016; pp. 344. After Tsar Alexander III abolished the state’s monopoly on staging theatrical productions in 1882, private Russian theatres and “laboratory” environments quickly embraced the spirit of experimentation that was sweeping across Europe. In the decades preceding the emergence of Russia’s theatrical avant-garde during the 1910s and ’20s, the innovations of Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Fuchs, Adolph Appia, Edward Gordon Craig, and Max Reinhardt influenced Russia’s theoreticians and practitioners of theatre. Into this well-worn narrative of Russian theatre history, Dassia Posner’s trenchant study introduces another, unexpected progenitor of the Russian theatrical avant-garde: German romantic prose writer and playwright E. T. A. Hoffmann. In The Director’s Prism, Posner argues that Hoffmannian plots, themes, and form helped shape the theatrical experiments undertaken by Russian directors Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, and Sergei Eisenstein. She devotes a chapter to each of the three directors, invoking their pseudonyms borrowed from Hoffmannian characters as chapter titles: Meyerhold-Dapertutto (Hoffmann’s “Tale of the Lost Reflection”); Tairov-Celionati (Hoffmann’s Princess Brambilla); and Peregrinus Tyss Meets Pipifax (Peregrinus Tyss being Eisenstein’s pseudonym taken from Hoffmann’s Master Flea). The chapters are organized according to a consistent formula: a short “Prologue/Polemic,” an “Interlude,” and “Epilogue.” The prologues/polemics present each director’s work within the context of surrounding debates, and the interludes help “the reader locate the book’s central case studies and . . . link the book’s structure with its thematic content” (30). Posner uses the metaphor of the prism to articulate her understanding of an artist’s engagement with extant material and ideas. This approach derives from the fact that the three directors used either “prism” or “refraction” in reference to their creative processes (26), which allows Posner to use a hermeneutic that has an organic link to the objects of her analysis. Fastidiously avoiding the word influence, she instead proposes that we think of the three avant-garde theatre directors as prisms that refract (that is, creatively transform) Hoffmann’s body of work, as well as their own perceptions of life. Her optical metaphor aptly focuses our attention on the visual, which might otherwise be under-appreciated if she instead used the vague language of influence to characterize the directorial innovations in creating theatre as spectacle. Posner carefully scrutinizes the directors’ stagecraft from the viewer’s perspective, in particular such practices as framing characters and playing with multiple points of view. She also highlights the legacy of the capriccio, an Italian term born in the seventeenth century for a work that capriciously ignores or reworks existing rules of art. As a kind of idiosyncratic methodology used by playwrights and visual artists, the capriccio (which Hoffmann inherited from playwright Carlo Gozzi and illustrator Jacques Callot) represents a zigzagging of creative thought. For Posner, each directorial prismatic refraction is a manifestation of the capriccio’s idiosyncratic spirit as it comprises a deviation in form or content from the original source. Just as a prism bends light, so the artist (or director) reshapes a preceding work of art according to his caprice. Thus Hoffmann’s Princess Brambilla: A Capriccio after Jacques Callot refracts Callot’s drawings comprising the series Balli di Sfessania, which includes grotesque renderings of the commedia dell’arte figures. Hoffmann’s capriccio later gets refracted by Tairov in his production Princess Brambilla: A Kamerny Theatre Capriccio after Hoffmann. Further, the avant-garde’s reworkings of the Italian commedia dell’arte tradition offer another series of prismatic refractions: Meyerhold’s Columbine’s Veil gets refracted in Tairov’s Pierrette’s Veil and in Eisenstein’s collaboration with Sergei Yutkevich, Columbine’s Garter. Posner thus foregrounds the formal device of the capriccio as a model for creative appropriation and distortion: Hoffmann refracted the capriccio of Gozzi and Callot, and her trio of avant-garde directors refracted the capriccio of Hoffmann. In addition to their creative appropriations of Hoffmannian plots and themes...

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  Academic Studies Press eBooks · 2019-12-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• CHAPTER 4. Human Adaptation in Late-Soviet Environmental Science Fiction

  Academic Studies Press eBooks · 2019-12-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Russian Modernist Theatricality and Life-Creation in Petersburg

  University of Wisconsin Press eBooks · 2019-01-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Julia Vaingurt

  University of Illinois Chicago

  2 shared

• Frederick H. White

  1 shared

• Voyeurism In Pan Tadeusz

  1 shared

• Miedzy stawami wrowie

  1 shared

• Jako stary opiekun

  1 shared

• mfyn ukryty siedzi

  1 shared

Labs

• Slavic Languages and LiteraturesPI