Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, Cornell University, New York
Berlin Prize Fellow - Class of Fall 1999
Gavriel Shapiro is Professor of Comparative and Russian Literature at Cornell University. Before becoming a literary scholar, Shapiro graduated from Moscow University, majoring in chemistry, and worked as a News Editor for the Russian Division of The Voice of Israel in Jerusalem.
From September to December 1999, Shapiro had worked at the American Academy in Berlin on a book entitled The Sublime Artist’s Studio: Nabokov and Painting (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2009). Shapiro is also the author of Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque Cultural Heritage (1993), Delicate Markers: Subtexts in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Invitation to a Beheading” (1998), The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord: Nabokov and His Father (2014), and Thanksgiving All Year Round (2016) as well as the editor of Nabokov at Cornell (2003). Shapiro has also published numerous articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature and culture, has attended many international conferences, and has been invited to lecture at various universities in the United States and abroad.
A recent selection of articles:
“Dva primera ekfrazisa u Nabokova” [“Two Examples of Ekphrasis in Nabokov”]. In Teoriia i istoriia ekfrazisa: itogi i perspektivy izucheniia [The Theory and History of Ekphrasis: Results and Prospects of the Study], ed. T. E. Avtukhovich et al., 375–80. Siedlce: Wydawnictwo Naukowe, Instytut Kultury Regionalnej i Badań Literackich im. Franciszka Karpińskiego, 2018.
“Henry Lanz and His Contacts with Pasternak, Il´f and Petrov, and Nabokov.” The Nabokovian 75 (Spring 2018). https://thenabokovian.org/nabokovian-new-notes/75-2018sp.
“Robert Burness—Vladimir Nabokov’s English Tutor.” Nabokov Online Journal 12 (2018). http://www.nabokovonline.com/current-volume.html.
“Joseph Negro, the Tennis Coach Prototype in The Original of Laura.”
The Nabokovian 76 (Fall 2018). https://thenabokovian.org/node/35562.