This summer Dr. Katherine Bowers is celebrating the 150th anniversary of Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment through a digital outreach program organized as part of her SSHRC-funded project “Crime and Punishment at 150.” The project includes multiple online forums for discussion and new examination of the novel, from a Facebook-based summer reading group to a series of blog posts on The Bloggers Karamazov, the blog of the North American Dostoevsky Society. The centerpiece of the event is a creative Twitter project called @RodionTweets, which is tweeting the events of Crime and Punishment from its hero Raskolnikov’s perspective in real time.
“Crime and Punishment at 150″ will culminate in a film screening and international conference to be held at UBC in October. The conference theme is revisiting the novel in the 21st century through adaptation, interpretation, translation, transposition, new media, digital media, and new modes of reading, both in the classroom and outside. Also launching this fall are two library exhibits that have emerged from the project. One, on the novel’s cultural context, was written by students from Dr. Bowers’s RUSS 412 class last spring and will include an online version as well as an on-site exhibit at Cambridge University Library (UK). The other, which will be on-site at the University of Toronto’s Robarts Library in the fall, is about transpositions, translations, and adaptations of the novel.
The project is co-organized by Dr. Bowers and Dr. Kate Holland (Toronto) and supported through funding from SSHRC, the North American Dostoevsky Society, the CENES Department at UBC, and the Office of the Vice President for Research and International at UBC, as well as partnerships with Green College UBC, the Petro Jacyk Central and East European Resource Centre at the University of Toronto, the Cambridge University Library, the University of Bristol, and the BASEES 19th-Century Study Group.
