Medzhibovskaya Inessa

About

Inessa Medzhibovskaya is a Professor of Literary Studies and Liberal Studies at The New School, with a joint appointment at Eugene Lang College and The New School for Social Research in New York. A specialist in philology, intellectual history, and German and Slavic studies, with a background in international education, she focuses her work on investigating how literature and philosophy transmit human values within their specific cultural and historical contexts. Since 2004, when she joined The New School, she has taught seminars dedicated to Russian, German, and European classics, as well as single-text courses on foundational works such as Anna Karenina, Faust, Hamlet, and War and Peace, and was recognized as a distinguished professor in 2007. Medzhibovskaya is the author of internationally studied volumes, notably Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time (2008), the first definitive biography of Tolstoy's religious and philosophical evolution, and Tolstoy's On Life (2019), which explores the struggle of Russian thought for self-definition. She has also edited critical editions and collective volumes dedicated to this thinker, and her research bibliography was published by Oxford University Press in 2021 and in a revised version in 2024. Her book Tolstoy as Philosopher (2022) received an honorable mention from The Society for Textual Scholarship, demonstrating her remarkable contribution to the study of the intersection between literature, philosophy, and radical aesthetics. Medzhibovskaya's academic trajectory includes a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Princeton University (2001) and a postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University. Throughout her career, she has received several prestigious distinctions, including the Franklin Award from the American Philosophical Society (2010) and the Distinguished University Teaching Award from The New School (2007). Her research paths extend to fundamental issues such as revolutionary violence, moral redemption, and punishment, approaches that reflect her commitment to exploring how literature saves lives and offers essential insights into the human condition.