Giulia Dossi's research focuses on nineteenth-century Russian Realism and medical humanities. Her current book project examines the difficulties that writers and early psychiatrists encountered when trying to observe and describe a person's interiority. The idea that some of the most canonical writers of Russian literature (Goncharov, Turgenev, Saltykov-Shchedryn,  and Dostoevsky) created illegible characters defies the expectation of clarity that critics at the time sought in psychological prose and that readers have been taught to expect ever since. This project is rooted in the struggle between metaphysics and materialism that dominated cultural and medical discourses in Russia from the 1840s to the 1880s, but it also addresses broader questions of affect theory, medical storytelling and narratology.

Dossi’s contribution to the medical humanities reaches beyond early psychiatry. She is the co-editor of a volume on epidemics and contagion in Slavic and East European Studies. She is also pursuing her interest in contagion in Dostoevsky’s work as well as in the figure of the “shrieker” across disciplines. Shrieker is a term that described a person affected by a specific type of religious hysteria, a condition that was considered to be extremely contagious and one that could give rise to epidemic crises.

At St. Olaf, she is looking forward to teaching courses on Russian language, lesser known nineteenth-century Russian authors, films directed by women, and Dostoevsky, between religion and science.

Recent Publications

“Contagion and Disgust in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Children,” Russian Literature, Volumes 138–139, May-June 2023, pp 19-41
“Sofia Ivanovna Karamazova, Shrieker,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Band 22, 2022, Peter Lang, pp. 215-240