Russell Scott Valentino

Russell Scott Valentino (born 1962) is a literary scholar, translator, and editor. He received his Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1993. He taught Slavic and comparative literature at the University of Iowa from 1994 to 2012, was a member of University of Iowa's [Translation Workshop] from 2003 to 2012, and, served as Editor-in-chief of The Iowa Review from 2009 to 2013. Since 2013 he has served as chair of the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Indiana University and President of the American Literary Translators Association.
He is the author of the monograph Vicissitudes of Genre in the Russian Novel (2001), which explores genre mixing in works by Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and Maksim Gorky. He is also the translator of book-length translations from Italian, Russian, and Croatian works of the 20th and 21st centuries. His essays and short translations of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in such venues as The Iowa Review, Two Lines, Circumference, The Del Sol Review, [91st Meridian], [Poroi], and Slavic Review.
Valentino's work has been supported by the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of State, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Howard Foundation. He has twice been awarded Fulbright Research grants to Croatia, and his translations from the Italian and Croatian have been nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Book of the Year Awards held by Foreword Magazine.
His translations include:
Materada, by Fulvio Tomizza (from the Italian);
Persuasion and Rhetoric, by Carlo Michelstaedter (from the Italian, with David Depew, and Cinzia Sartini Blum);
Between Exile and Asylum: An Eastern Epistolary, by Predrag Matvejevic (from the Croatian);
A Castle in Romagna, by Igor Stiks (from the Croatian, with Tomislav Kuzmanovic);
The Silence of the Sufi, by Sabit Madaliev (from the Russian);
Anima Mundi, by Susanna Tamaro (from the Italian, with Cinzia Sartini Blum); and
The Other Venice: Secrets of the City, by Predrag Matvejevic (from the Croatian), 2007.
His most recent publications include:
The Woman in the Window: Commerce, Consensual Fantasy, and the Quest for Masculine Virtue in the Russian Novel.
The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim & A Life in Translation. Esther Allen, Sean Cotter, and Russell Scott Valentino, eds.