MEERSON, Olga

Olga MeersonOlga Meerson was born in 1959 in Moscow and emigrated to Israel in 1974, where she completed her high school education at the Hebrew University High School in Jerusalem in 1977. She subsequently moved to the United States and received her B.A. in Liberal Arts from Hunter College in New York City (1984) and her M.A. (1986) and Ph.D. (1991) in Russian Literature from Columbia University.

She is married (1977--present) to an Orthodox priest and theologian and has three children: Elijah, Elizabeth, and Simeon.

Dr. Meerson's interests range from Old Testament exegesis (she is fluent in Hebrew) to Russian Orthodox liturgical poetics and musicology (she served as a reader and choir director in a Russian Orthodox parish for 15 years), to Ilya Zdanevich, Andrei Platonov, and contemporary Russian women writers, especially poets.
Her strongest professional asset is her ear. She is particularly interested in far-reaching philosophical and theological consequences of close readings of literary texts, as well as in the hidden motivation for apparent non-sequiturs.

Although she knows and likes to teach 19th Century Russian Literature, her interest in Dostoevsky (and, even more so, Gogol) stems from her fascination with the 20th Century, and even the 21st.

Since 1987 (and since 1995 at Georgetown), she has taught a wide variety of courses in Russian and in English. She is the author of Dostoevsky's Taboos published by Dresden University Press.