#62: A Russian Emigre Poet with Nina Gopaldas ’24, Comparative Literature

Burn Your Draft is back from summer break! Check out this interview with Nina Gopaldas ’24, whose thesis involved translating poetry by a Russian refugee named Olga Skopichenko who lived in a refugee camp in the Philippines for a short time after World War II. Nina also tells Avis about her journey to Reed as a transfer student and about how she started college as an applied math major specializing in mathematical finance and became a comparative literature major at Reed.

Reed community members can read Nina’s thesis, “‘Take a Hundred Lines for the Memory of Those who Lived on Tubabao’: The Poetics of Exile and Displacement in Olga Skopichenko’s Verse,” online in the Electronic Theses Archive.

#30: Writing the Russian Revolution with Misha Lerner ’21, Russian

Join Misha and Amelie as they talk about Misha’s thesis on Leon Trotsky’s theory of revolutionary language and symbolism. You’ll also learn a bit about Misha’s thoughts on how the literary thesis experience is more of a reading project than a writing project.

Reed community members can read Misha’s thesis, “Trotsky Writes the Russian Revolution: The Symbol of the Explosion in Trotsky’s My Life and The History of the Russian Revolution and its Meta-Symbolic Significance,” online in the Electronic Theses Archive.