Jason Merrill

Jason Merrill is a Professor of Russian at Michigan State University and also serves as the Associate Director of MSU’s Center for European and Eurasian Studies. He served as the Director of the Middlebury College Kathryn Wasserman School of Russian from 2010 to 2024. At Michigan State he teaches Russian language, Russian literature in translation, Russian cinema, and a survey of East European literature and film. His literary research continues to focus on the Russian Symbolist author Fedor Sologub in the context of the Symbolist movement, examining questions of influence, plagiarism, and play with intertextuality in his works. He has published articles on Sologub in the journals Russkaia literatura (St. Petersburg), Slavic and East European Journal, Scando-Slavica, Russian Literature, Slavonica, and in several collections. He has published on aspects of Russian cinema in Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, and on language pedagogy in Russian Language Journal and various collections and newsletters. He has co-authored two Russian-language textbooks, Animation for Russian Conversation (Focus, 2008) and Russian Folktales: A Student Reader (2001, second edition 2016). He co-edited the collection The Art of Teaching Russian (Georgetown UP, 2020), the collection The Content-Based Teaching of Russian (Routledge, 2025) and a special volume of Russian Language Journal dedicated to teaching Russian during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is currently working on a biography of Fedor Sologub.