Ainsley Morse

Ainsley E. Morse serves as Associate Professor of East European, Eurasian and Russian Studies and Associated Professor of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. She received her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University in 2016, an M.A. in Comparative Slavic Literatures from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008, and a B.A. summa cum laude in Russian Language and Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2005. Morse joined Dartmouth as Assistant Professor in the Russian Department in Fall 2019. Previously, she was Visiting Assistant Professor at Pomona College during the 2018-19 academic year, Visiting Lecturer at the University of California, San Diego in Winter 2018, and a Teaching Fellow and Graduate Student Instructor at Harvard University from 2012-2014.

A scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature from the former USSR republics such as Russia and Ukraine, and the former Yugoslavia including present-day Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro, Morse focuses on experimental literary forms ranging from early twentieth-century avant-gardes to innovative works amid state-led repressions and limitations. Her monograph Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children’s Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2021) traces the evolution of a "childlike aesthetic" through modernist experimentation, Soviet utopian visions, censorship, and the interplay of children's and underground literature. As a prolific literary translator from Russian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, and Ukrainian—specializing in poetry—she has produced editions such as Permanent Evolution: The Collected Theoretical Works of Yuri Tynianov (co-edited and co-translated with Philip Redko, Academic Studies Press, 2019), which received the 2021 AATSEEL Book Prize for Best Scholarly Translation; F-Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (co-edited with Eugene Ostashevsky and Galina Rymbu, isolarii, 2020); The Fine Feats of the Five Cockerels Gang: A Surrealist-Marxist Children’s Epic by Aleksandar Vučo and Dušan Matić (co-edited and co-translated with Aleksandar Bošković, Brill Avant-Garde Critical Series, 2022); and The Scar We Know: Poems by Lida Yusupova (editor, Cicada Press, 2021). Morse co-edits Cicada Press, an independent publisher of translated poetry. Her honors include the 2023 Karen E. Wetterhahn Memorial Award for Distinguished Creative or Scholarly Achievement and the Dean of the Faculty Teaching Award at Dartmouth College, as well as the 2020 ASEEES First Book Subvention, and multiple translation awards including the 2018 AATSEEL Award for Best Literary Translation.

Professional Email: Ainsley.E.Morse@dartmouth.edu