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Home: Our Faculty: Brooklyn College Faculty:

Thomas Barran

  Professor
  Department: Modern Languages and Literatures
  Location: 4214 Boylan Hall
  Phone: 718-951-3127
  Fax: 718-951-4235
  Email:

Professor Barran attended public schools in northeastern Ohio and gravitated to Russian literature. He graduated from Columbia College with a dual major in Russian and English in 1968. He then spent four years teaching elementary school in a poor, rural area of northern Ohio. He spent a year in Leningrad on IREX/Fulbright Fellowship and has returned to Russia numerous times. While finishing his dissertation, he worked full-time as an index editor on the MLA International Bibliography, after which he worked at the Institute for International Education as an administrator on the Fulbright exchanges. He taught Russian at Washington University in St. Louis for two years before coming to Brooklyn College.

Education:
Ph.D., Columbia University - 1984 (Slavic Languages)


Areas of Expertise:
Russian links with French culture in the 18th and 19th centuries; first book: "Russia Reads Rousseau, 1762-1825." Has published articles on dreams in Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina," painting in Dostoevsky's "Idiot" and the politics of Tolstoy's "What is Art?" He is passionate about new Russian cinema, and he is currently writing a book about the absence of past and history in "Anna Karenina." As a sideline, he publishes reviews of classical music concerts.