Anne Eakin-Moss is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Center. The News-Letter sat down with Moss at her home in Hampden to discuss the Humanities Center at Hopkins, the contrivances in Soviet cinema and the mass appeal of Fruitloops.
News-Letter (N-L): How did you wind up here? What was the path to Hopkins?
Anne Eakin-Moss (AEM): I came here with my husband, who was hired in the History department to teach modern European Jewish history.
I was finishing up my dissertation at Stanford in Russian literature and so I was invited to teach some courses in the Humanities Center, and I guess they liked me, because I ended up getting a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow to stay for the past two years, and I'll be teaching in the Humanities Center next fall as a visiting professor.
So I came to Hopkins. It was not that Hopkins came to me. But obviously there's no Slavic department here, or Russian studies, so I filled a hole in their course offerings, and I've been teaching Russian literature and cinema ever since.
N-L: What do you think about the Humanities Center as a department? Do you enjoy the freedom or is it frustrating that there isn't a full-fledged Slavic department?
AEM: Oh, it's fantastic. I love the types of undergraduate students who come to my class because they're attracted to the Humanities Center.
I teach what I know, which is Russian literature, cinema, culture, history; but I teach it in a different way because I'm teaching it in the Humanities Center, so I question the categories and I teach from a philosophical and theoretical point of view, in a way that I wouldn't be allowed to do in a regular Slavic department.
So I don't teach a monograph course on, for instance, Dostoevsky and all the big novels; I taught a course on Dostoevsky and critical theory, the way in which Dostoevsky's novels influenced the course of critical thinking from the time of the publication of his novels through the 20th century.
So I like that it allows me to think theoretically and philosophically, and it's especially exciting that I end up teaching students who are engaged in the "big questions" of modernity, and the relationship of the individual to their community, and the problem of economics . . . and small children! [Holds her son and laughs]
You know, what I miss about not having a Slavic department here is students who can read and speak Russian.
I have to teach everything in translation, so I'm limited in what I can teach because I have to choose things that are subtitled or translated.
But the Humanities Center gives me great freedom to teach from my own research, and I think that's actually one of the great things about Hopkins.
The fact that it's small means that departments don't try to cover everything; they get people who are really good at what they do, which means undergraduates are taking courses with people who are experts and at the forefront of research, in the humanities at large.
It means that undergraduates get a really quirky education, but I think it makes them great thinkers, and it opens up horizons that wouldn't necessarily be opened by traditional coursework.
And I think that's what the Humanities Center has to offer: a way of thinking about all the disciplines, making you question the boundaries between disciplines. It has taken my own research to a much more interesting, theoretical level.
N-L: You're teaching a class this semester on Russian cinema during the Soviet Union. How did you come to focus on this topic in your own studies, such as your dissertation?
AEM: Well that's actually only a little piece of my dissertation. Russian literature is profoundly pessimistic and depressing.
But no matter how depressing it gets, and no matter how pessimistic these writers are about their relationship to modernity and the individualist's alienation, what surprised me when I was doing my initial coursework was that women's friendships - the relationships among women that these Russian authors create - make this a utopian place, even when they're most pessimistic about how modernity has soured our relationships with other people.
So I write about aristocratic women's friendships in Tolstoy's War and Peace, I write about Chernyshevsky's radical utopian novel about women's sewing communes, and then I write about stories about the brothels and women's prisons around the turn of the century.
The reason I turned to cinema was that I noticed that throughout the 1930s and at the height of the Stalinist regime, Soviet films repeatedly show images of happy, productive women peasants and workers frolicking and dancing in the fields and factories.
You might think this was purely the invention of Stalinism, but I was seeing that it was more deeply rooted in Russian culture and that that was a problem I needed to figure out.
So that's why I ended up starting to study cinema, because I wanted to know where that came from, and figure out how unique it is, and how it was that cinema was using all the very manipulative devices of the whole experience.
Because cinema itself isn't like a novel.
It's created by a director and a screenwriter, and in the Soviet case it's created by this huge repressive machinery of censorship and self-censorship, all the way up to Stalin himself.
He's looking at the screenplays of all of these films and giving his advice about what should be cut, or how a character might develop further in the film.
I mean, he has his own private screening room and he's watching these films while he's sending thousands of people off to be purged and collectivizing the farms in the Ukraine and slaughtering thousands and thousands of people.
He's really concerned about cinema. So that was the problem that really fascinated me and made me turn to the study of cinema as an institution, and as a means of manipulation.
That's the other neat thing about Hopkins, is that you can teach a course in order to teach yourself more.
Every time I teach a course I teach it slightly differently, because I have slightly different interests at that time.
N-L: Was there a time, in college perhaps, when you settled on the idea of academics as a career? Did you ever freak out and say "Screw it, I'll just become a lawyer?"
AEM: Oh yeah, I didn't go straight to graduate school. I did work in the non-profit sector, working for an advocacy agency.
I set up an after-school program for New York City public high school kids, and did a lot of fundraising and non-profit work, and I thought that would be the way to go.
But I missed it, and I spent most of the time commuting from New Jersey reading Russian literature, and decided it was time to go back to school.
N-L: You and your husband are both academics. How does that contribute to your family life - for instance, with raising your sons? Are there any expectations?
AEM: I don't think so. Well, you know, I'm sure it will have an impact on them. You could tell who the faculty kids were when I was in college, but I hope I'm not doing that to my kids.
Of course, I am speaking Yiddish as the primary language at home to them, and they're watching Stalinist films with me, but I hope not.
My son, whom we're not allowing to have a Playstation or a Nintendo DS, was talking about when he gets to go to college he's going to save up enough money so he can have a DS and eat Fruitloops.
And watch as much TV as he wants. So, OK. As long as you do your homework and study Yiddish with us, I'll help you buy the DS when you go to college.
