Dana Dragunoiu

Professor

• B.A. Honours (University of Windsor), M.A. (University of London), Ph.D. (University of Toronto)
• Email Dana Dragunoiu

Research Interests

• Anglo-American and European literature (with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries)
• Ethics and intellectual history
• Vladimir Nabokov studies

Current Research

Though my two scholarly books focus on the work of the Russo-American writer Vladimir Nabokov, they do so by ranging widely across the intellectual and cultural histories of Russia, Europe, and the United States.

My first book, Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism (Northwestern University Press, 2011), provides an original account of the relationship between art and politics in Nabokov’s Russian and English novels. Challenging the sincerity of Nabokov’s self-proclaimed “supreme indifference” to social and political matters, the book argues that an ambitious, complex, and surprisingly pragmatic political project rests at the heart of his fiction. The full stakes of this project remain invisible and unintelligible when his work is read in isolation from the political and philosophical debates that shaped the highly charged political climate of his youth in Russia. Even Nabokov’s most explicitly “American” novels (for example, Lolita) and his most pointed engagements with American politics remain firmly embedded in the particular brand of “old-fashioned liberalism” that he associated with his own father’s political career in pre-revolutionary Russia.

My second book, titled Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts (Northwestern University Press, 2021), won the Brian Boyd Prize for Best Second Book on Nabokov sponsored by the International Vladimir Nabokov Society. It tells the story of the subtle and generative interaction of ethics and aesthetics in Nabokov’s writing. The book presses Nabokov’s novels into a triangular dialogue with the achievements of some of the writers he loved best (especially Pushkin, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Proust), with Kantian moral philosophy, and with a body of literature (the European traditions of chivalric literature he studied as an undergraduate at Cambridge) whose profound influence on Nabokov remains largely unrecognized. This configuration of literary influences and philosophical contexts enables me to give an original account of the formation, career, and legacies of an author whose work remains important for both the general reading public and for academic scholarship.

I have also written a trade book on the subject of Nabokov in the Simply Charly series published by Casa Carlini. Titled Simply Nabokov (Casa Carlini, 2025), this short volume offers an accessible guide to the life and art of Vladimir Nabokov without sacrificing the depth and complexity of either. 

Honours and Awards

• 2023-present       Member of the Executive Board of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society (IVNS)
• 2023-present       Conference Coordinator of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society (IVNS)
• 2023-present       Deputy Editor of TheNabokovian.org 
• 2018-2023         General Editor of TheNabokovian.org
• 2019-2021         Member of the Carleton University Senate

Peer-Refereed Essays

“Humbert’s ‘Sense of Sin’ and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov” The Nabokovian: Notes and Brief Annotations 88 (Spring 2025): 1-7.

“Hazel Shade’s Russian Sisterhood, or Is Pale Fire a Feminist Novel?” Nabokov Studies 18 (2022-2023): 7-28.

“Making History from the Future: Lolita and Proust’s Cahier 36.” Nabokov Online Journal 15 (2021): 1-19.

“The Afterlives of Odette and Albertine in Lolita’s Final Chapters.” Comparative Literature 72:3 (2020): 340-60.

“Lolita: Nabokov’s Rewriting of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.” Nabokov Studies 13 (2014): 20-32.

“Neo’s Kantian Choice:  The Matrix Reloaded and the Limits of the Posthuman.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 40.4 (2007): 51-67.

“J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K and the Thin Theory of the Good.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 41.1 (2006): 69-92.

“Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada:  Art, Deception, Ethics.” Contemporary Literature 46.2  (2005): 311-39.

“Psychoanalysis, Film Theory, and the Case of Being John Malkovich.” Film Criticism 26.2 (2001-2002): 1-18.

“Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading and the Russian Radical Tradition.”  Journal of Modern Literature 25.1 (2001): 53-69.

“Fundamental Ambiguities:  Existential Freedom and Responsibility in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe.”  Critique:  Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42.3 (2001): 309-26.

“Hemingway’s Debt to Stendhal’s Armance in The Sun Also Rises.”  Modern Fiction Studies 46.4 (2000): 868-92.

“Dialogues with Berkeley:  Idealist Metaphysics and Epistemology in Nabokov’s Bend Sinister.”  Nabokov Studies 5 (1998/1999): 47-62.

Chapters in Edited Books 

“Time, Memory, the General, and the Specific in Lolita and À la recherche du temps perdu” in Vladimir Nabokov and the Fictions of Memory. Edited by Irena Księżopolska and Mikołaj Wiśniewski. Warsaw: Fundacja Augusta hr. Cieszkowskiego, 2019.

“Nabokov and Liberalism” in Nabokov in Context. Edited by David Bethea and Siggy Frank. Cambridge UP, 2016.

“On Pity and Courtesy in Nabokov’s Ethics.” Edited by Brian Boyd and Marijeta Bozovic. Nabokov Upside Down. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2016.

“Lolita: Law, Ethics, Politics.” Approaches to Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita. Ed. Zoran Kuzmanovich and Galya Diment. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2008. 121-127.

Essays Translated by Others 

“Życie i czasy Michaela K: J.M. Coetzeego i wąska teoria dobra.” Trans. Piotr Jakubowski. In Wielcy artyści ucieczek: Eseje o Życiu i czasach Michaela K J.M. Coetzeego w trzydziestą rocznicę publikacji powieści. Ed. Piotr Jakubowski and M. Jankowska. Kraków: “Ha!art,” 2013. [“J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K and the Thin Theory of the Good,” in Great Escape Artists: Essays on J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K on the 30^th Anniversary of Its Publication. Eds. Piotr Jakubowski and M. Jankowska. Cracow: Ha!Art, 2013]

Recent Papers Presented at Conferences

“Mapping the Impermissible in Vladimir Nabokov,” ASEEES 2024 Annual Convention, Boston, USA, November 21-24, 2024. 

“Nabokov and the Nature of Family,” Vladimir Nabokov: Écrire la nature/Vladimir Nabokov: Writing Nature Conference, Lausanne, Switzerland, June 27-30, 2023.

“Hazel Shade as Descendant of Tatiana Larin, or Is Pale Fire a Feminist Text?” Hidden Nabokov Conference, Wellesley, Massachusetts, June 16-19, 2022.

“What does Nabokov’s fiction tell us about love? / Что мы узнаем о любви из прозы Nабокова?” (in English), Набоковские чтения/Nabokov Readings Conference, Russian Academy of Sciences, Pushkin House, July 1-3, 2021.

“Lolita and Proust’s Cahier 36.” Colloque international/International Conference “Vladimir Nabokov: histoire et géographie”/“Vladimir Nabokov: History and Geography.” Paris, June 6-8, 2019.

“Liar! Or the Untold Story of Mira Belochkin in Pnin.” ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) 49^th Annual Convention, November 9-12, 2017.

“Time and Memory in Nabokov’s Lolita and Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.” Vladimir Nabokov and the Fictions of Memory International Conference. Warsaw, Poland. September 22-23, 2016.

“The Senses Don’t Make Sense: Nabokov and Proust.” “Do the Senses Make Sense?”: The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Work. International Conference organized by the French Vladimir Nabokov Society. Biarritz, France. April 28-May 1, 2016.

“The Art of Truth and the Art of Deception: Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Tolstoy’s War and Peace.” ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) 47^th Annual Convention, Boston, November 19-22, 2015.

Recent Graduate Courses

ENGL 5900: The Great Russian Novel: Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

ENGL 5606: Nabokov’s Lolita and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov 

ENGL 5606: Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Nabokov’s Pale Fire

ENGL 5606: Kant and the Modern Novel

ENGL 5603: Vladimir Nabokov in Context

ENGL 5607: The New Liberal Imagination

ENGL 5607: Vladimir Nabokov:  Fiction, Philosophy, Politics

Ph.D. Dissertation Committees

Olivier Jacques. Dissertation on twentieth-century British literature and the Bolshevik Revolution. To be defended in 2022.

Alicha Keddy. Dissertation on Modernist women writers. Defended 2020.

Doctoral Dissertations Examined

Erik Eklund, A Triptych of Bottomless Light: Repetition, Originality, and Transcendence in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Principal supervisors: Prof. Alison Milbank and Prof. Siggy Frank, University of Nottingham, England, UK. July 23, 2023.

Roy Groen, Nabokov in Conversation: A Philosophico-Critical Exploration of the Moral Dimension of His American Works. Principal supervisors: Prof. dr. S.A. Levie and Prof. dr. P.M.J. van Tongeren. Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. 15 November 2016.

Master’s Thesis Supervised

Aislynn Smith, “Strategies for Surviving Putin’s Russia: Contemporary Anti-Utopian Literature,” EURUS. Thesis was successfully defended on August 23, 2024. External Examiner: Dr. Erica Fraser, Internal Examiner: Dr. Jeff Sahadeo, Chair: Dr. Paul Goode.