Hilde Hoogenboom, Assistant Professor, (PhD Columbia University, 1996), was the Jesse Ball DuPont Fellow at the National Humanities Center (2000-1) and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Eurasia Program of the Social Sciences Research Council (2001-2) for her book project, "Sentimental Realism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature," a study of realist aesthetics, gender, and noble culture. Co-editor of two collections of essays on Russian women writers, she has numerous articles on women, including a historical, comparative survey of bio-bibliographic compilations of women as a genre, George Sand in Russia, and populist revolutionary autobiography. Her research interests include nineteenth-century women writers, autobiography and non-canonical genres, and the Francophone literature of Russia. Besides Russian language and surveys in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature, she teaches translation, film, gender, literature and opera, as well as general comparative survey courses in humanities, civilization, and autobiography. She is President of the Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies Association.

This new translation of Catherine the Great's Memoirs from French with a substantial introduction and commentary (Modern Library at Random House, 2005; paperback 2006) is the first for which the translators consulted the original manuscripts in her own hand. Catherine's final memoir (1794) is not only a fascinating political and court memoir, but also an important, unique historical and Enlightenment document. Meant for general and specialist readers alike, this book is supported by a grant from the National Humanties Center for research and teaching in the undergraduate classroom. Professor Hoogenboom has been interviewed for several television documentaries on Catherine the Great (A&E Biography Channel and National Geographic).