NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY RESEARCH INITIATIVE IN RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY, LITERATURE, AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT

Melvin Thomas is an ABD doctoral candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. His research interests include: the intersection of Russian Orthodoxy and Russian literature and poetry; Slavophilism and Eurasianism; and Jews and anti-Semitism in Russian literature. His dissertation, When Third Rome Falls: Viacheslav Ivanov, Georges Florovsky, and Religious Patriotism Amid the First Wave of Russian Emigration, examines how the fall of the Russian Empire and the experience of emigrating to the West shaped the religious views of the Symbolist poet Viacheslav Ivanov and the Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky. Melvin earned his B.A. in Government and Russian from Georgetown University in 2018 and his M.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Princeton University in 2023.