Thomas Hodge, Professor of Russian, was born and raised in Northern California. He attended Pomona College, where he began studying Russian and played four years of varsity baseball; he earned his B.A. in English Literature cum laude there in 1984. Tom received his B.A. (M.A.) in Russian Language and Literature from Magdalen College, Oxford University, in 1986. He then attended Stanford University, where he specialized in the history of nineteenth-century Russian literature. He earned his Stanford A.M. in 1988 with the thesis On Fedor Ivanovich Tolstoy, "The American," and Russian Literature, was a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center during 1988-89, and received a Social Science Research Dissertation fellowship in 1990. Living in Moscow during 1990-91, Tom completed the research for his 1992 Stanford Ph.D. dissertation, Mutatis Mutandis: Poetry of the Russian Romance in the Early Nineteenth-Century Russia, which traced the relationship between Russian vocal music and Russian poetry.

 

At the Russian Department of Wellesley College since the fall of 1992, and frequent Chair of that department since 1994, Tom has taught first-year Russian language and courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature in English, and on Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and nineteenth-century poetry in Russian and in English translation. Every other year, Tom co-teaches a field course for Wellesley students at Lake Baikal, in Siberia, and has lectured on Baikal at the Smithsonian Institution. He received Wellesley's Pinanski Prize for Excellence in Teaching in June, 1995, was promoted to Associate Professor in the fall of 1999, and to Professor in 2007.

 

Tom's articles on Russian literature and music, in English and in Russian, have appeared in American, English and Russian scholarly journals, The New Republic, and The Dictionary of Literary Biography. He has written program notes for the Los Angeles Philharmonic's and Salzburg Festival's concerts and recitals of Russian music. Tom's annotated translation of Sergei Aksakov's Notes on Fishing (1847), the classic treatise on angling, appeared in Northwestern University Press's "Russian Literature and Theory" series in 1997. His second book, A Double Garland: Poetry and Music in Early Nineteenth Century Russia, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2000. Tom is currently at work on a book-length analysis of the nature-writing of Ivan Turgenev: Hunting Nature: Ivan Turgenev and the Organic World. His other interests include fly fishing and fly tying, cooking, squash, backpacking, and bird watching.