Hampshire College

Aleksandar Stević, visiting assistant professor of English and comparative literature, has recently completed his doctoral dissertation in Comparative Literature at Yale University, where he has served as a Whiting Fellow in the Humanities and a graduate fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center. He also holds an M.A. and M.Phil. in Comparative Literature from Yale, a B.A. and an M.A. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Belgrade, and is an alumnus of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University.

Drawing simultaneously on narrative theory, extensive archival research, and disciplines such as cultural sociology and anthropology, professor Stević’s research focuses primarily on the ways in which the novel as a form interacts with various developments in social, intellectual, and political history. He is currently at work on a book project, a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of the development of the European Bildungsroman in the hundred years between 1830 and 1930. Beyond the 19th and 20th century novel in English, French, and (occasionally) Russian, his work explores the history and theory of tragedy from Aeschylus to contemporary cinema, the political commitments of European modernisms, problems of Holocaust representation (with particular focus on Central and Eastern Europe), the history of aesthetics, and translation theory.

As an undergraduate, professor Stević has translated to Serbo-Croatian Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, and has been an avid translator of literary theory ever since. His translations include the texts of J. Hillis Miller, Stephen Greenblatt, Charles Segal, Jerome McGann, Judith Butler, and Luce Irigaray, among others. Most recently he has edited, translated into Serbo-Croatian, and wrote an introduction for a collection of contemporary British and American essays on the political and religious contexts of the Greek tragic theatre. Entitled The Politics of Tragedy, this four hundred page volume is slated to be published in Belgrade in the fall of 2012.

At Hampshire, professor Stević teaches courses on the forms of violence in the novel from Dickens and Dostoevsky to Irvine Welsh and J.M. Coetzee, on (not) coming of age in the fiction of writers as diverse as Balzac, Mann, Joyce, and Jeanette Winterson, on class and sexuality in post-1945 Britain, and on the history of tragedy from the Greeks to contemporary European Cinema.

Recent Courses
HACU-0168: Varieties of Tragic Experience (Spring 2013)
HACU-0237: Sex, Class, and Thatcherism: The Forms of Postwar British Culture (Spring 2013)
HACU-0191: Arrested Development: On Not Growing Up in the European Novel (Fall 2012)
HACU-0281: Society, Violence and the Novel (Fall 2012)