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Bio

Megan Swift is a specialist in Russian literature, book art, and culture. She first visited Russia when it was still in the Soviet Union, on a high school trip in 1989. She learned Russian at McGill University and then lived on and off in St. Petersburg, Russia, throughout the 1990s. She has an MA in Comparative Literature and PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Toronto (2002).

Dr. Swift’s first book, Picturing the Page, Illustrated Children’s Literature and Reading under Lenin and Stalin (2020) won two book prizes. Her second book is Revolutionary Aftereffects, Material, Social, and Cultural Legacies of 1917 in Russia Today (2022).

Courses

• SLST 101: Beginning Russian
• SLST 102: Beginning Russian II
• SLST 160: Culture of the Russian Revolution
• SLST 180: Magic and the Fairytale World
• SLST 300: Slavic Cultural Studies
• SLST 461: Putin’s Russia
• SLST 481: Existence and Anxiety in Dostoevsky

Selected Publications

Megan Swift, “The Forest Newspaper: Depicting nature and animals for the Soviet and post-   Soviet child.” International Research in Children’s Literature. Vol. 18, No. 2 (2025).

Megan Swift, “Author’s Response” in “A Roundtable on Megan Swift’s Picturing the Page:  Illustrated Children’s Literature and Reading under Lenin and Stalin” by James Krapfl, Sara Pankenier Weld, Olga Voronina, Anastasia Kostetskaya and Megan Swift. Canadian Slavonic Papers: Vol. 64, No. 4 (2022): 490-510.

Megan Swift, “Pochta: Puteshestvie, Dostavka, Vozvrashchenie,” Detskie chteniia, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2021): 308-322.

Megan Swift, “Legacies of State Socialism in the Russian History and Literature Curriculum: Secondary Schools, Textbook Wars and State Memory,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. 63, No. 1-2 (2021): 33-49.

Megan Swift, “The Poet, The Peasant and the Nation: Aleksandr Puškin’s ‘Skazka o pope  i o rabotnike ego Balde’ [Tale of the Priest and of his worker Balda] (1830) in Illustrated Editions 1917-53.” Russian Literature, Volumes 87-89 (January-April 2017): 123-146.

Megan Swift, “The Bronze Horseman Rides Again: The Stalinist Reimaging of Alexander Pushkin’s Mednyi vsadnik, 1928-53.” The Russian Review, (Vol. 72, No. 1) January 2013: 24-44.

Selected Presentations/Talks

(2024) Conference presentation: “Doing it Ourselves: Spontaneity and Restraint in Early Soviet Pedagogies of Paper Craft.”  The Child and the Book Conference. Université de Rouen-Normandie. May 2024.

(2023) Author podcast: Host Polina Popova (56 min).

(2023) Conference presentation: “Rebiata i zveriata (Kids and Cubs): Depictions of nature and animals in Soviet and post-Soviet children’s literature.” University of California (Santa Barbara). August 2023.

(2023) Conference presentation: “What You Should Read to your Child: The Role of the Illustrated Early Soviet Children’s Book in Russia Today.” York University. June 2023.

(2022) Conference presentation: “War games: fizkul’tura and military preparation in illustrated children’s literature of the 1920s and 1930s.” (virtual Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities) May 2022.

(2020) Author blog: , the blog of the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. Posted Oct. 29, 2020.   

(2020) Author blog: University of Toronto Press Blog. Posted July 16, 2020.       

(2021) Conference presentation: “The Soviet State Literature Textbook and the Construction of the National Past.” Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). New Orleans (virtual). November 2021.

(2021) Conference presentation: “Studying 1917 in post-socialist Russia: memorializing the national past in textbooks from 1991 to today.” 10^th World Congress of the International Council for Central and European Studies (ICCEES). Montreal, PQ (virtual). August 2021.

Current Research Projects/Information

Megan Swift’s current book project looks at best-selling books for Russian children that cross the Soviet-post-Soviet divide. The project investigates why, among a rich array of choices, works from an outdated political ideology are still selected by parents and enthusiastically read by children. Under the working title Pages from the Past, this project explores what cultural turns and publishing practices take place to make the books of the past speak to a post-socialist child reading audience.