Ingrid Kleespies is Associate Professor of Russian Studies. She received her B.A. in Slavic Studies from Harvard University and M.A. and Ph.D. in Slavic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her areas of interest include Romanticism, Russian intellectual history, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture, and literature of travel and empire more generally. Her book, A Nation Astray: Nomadism and National Identity in Russian Literature, considers the key role played by the image of the nomad in the pressing literary debates over Russian identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in particular in seminal works by writers such as Karamzin, Pushkin, Chaadaev, Goncharov, and Dostoevsky. She is co-editor (with Lyudmila Parts) of Goncharov in the Twenty-First Century, a collection of scholarly essays dedicated to a fresh look at Ivan Goncharov’s life and work through a variety of contemporary critical perspectives. She is currently completing a book entitled The Necessary Man: Petr Chaadaev and the Invention of Russian Literature that investigates the outsize (if unsung) place of Russia’s “first philosopher” Petr Chaadaev in the nineteenth-century Russian literary canon. In other recent work she examines Russian and early Soviet mythologies surrounding Siberia and the eastern “frontier.”