PSU professor receives National Endowment for the Humanities grant to work on Soviet literature

Cassio de Oliveira (right), a Portland State University assistant professor of Russian, World Languages and Literatures, will receive a $6,000 stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to fund his research this summer about Soviet literature.

The NEH summer stipend program annually draws faculty applicants from throughout the United States, and grants awards to only about 8 percent of them. 

De Oliveira’s grant will fund archival research and the completion of a chapter of a book he is working on about Soviet literature in the 1920s and ‘30s. The book, titled “Writing Rogues,” probes the fraught relationship between literature, ideology, nation and representation in the early Soviet Union. It focuses on a form of literature that imagined the new Soviet reality through the exploits of people left on the margins of society.

The NEH, a federal agency created in 1965, is one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States. It awards grants to top-rated proposals examined by panels of independent external reviewers.