Profiles
Jessie Labov
Department of Comparative Literature
Office: (650) 723-0605
Email: jlabov@stanford.edu
Website: www.stanford.edu/~jlabovField: Twentieth-century Central and Southeastern European literature and film (primarily Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian, and formerly Yugoslavian).
Research interests: intellectual history of former dissidents in emigration; transatlantic publishing during the Cold War; the documentary aesthetic in Central European films of the 70s and 80s; postcolonial and transnational approaches to Central and Southeastern Europe; the role of Jewish culture in Central European identity; the politics of minor literatures and canon formation.
Jessie Labov received her PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University in 2004. Her dissertation, “Reinventing Central Europe: Cross Currents and the Émigré Writer in the 1980s,” traces an intellectual history of dissidents and writers speaking from exile in the West as they reintroduced a mythical and utopic region known as “Central Europe” located beyond the concepts of East and West. Parallel research interests have led to articles on auteurism in film and on Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog, as well as a new research project on the future of European identity in film. In the 2004-2005 academic year, Jessie taught a seminar on “The Austro-Hungarian Grotesque” in the Comparative Literature department, and co-organized two film series: one on Central Asian, Caucasian, and Balkan film; as well as “In the Absence of Authority: Russian, Polish and Hungarian Cinema, 1988-2003.” She also initiated a research group on “The Open Source Canon” in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. For the last two years, Jessie has also been co-organizer of an international project on cross-border publishing, which culminated in the conference "From Samizdat to Tamizdat: Dissident Media Crossing Borders Before and After 1989" this September in Vienna , Austria . In the 2005-2006 academic year she taught a sequence of courses surveying twentieth-century Central European literature and film, and this year she will be teaching an undergraduate course on “Underground Literatures and Unofficial Cultures” (Winter 2007) and a graduate seminar on “The Encyclopedia as Literature” (Spring 2007).
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