Panelists

Anthony Anemone is Associate Professor of Foreign Languages and Literary Studies and Associate Provost of Foreign Languages at The New School. He is the author of many articles on modern Russian literature and culture, including one on Nabokov's early Russian novel Despair.

Alfred Appel, Jr. is the author of a number of seminal texts on Nabokov and his works, including The Annotated Lolita and Nabokov's Dark Cinema.  An Emeritus Professor of English at Northwestern University, he is one of the most important figures from the first generation of Nabokov scholars in the United States. He is also the author of Signs of Life, The Art of Celebration, and Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce. 

Leland de la Durantaye is Associate Professor of English at Harvard University. He is the author of Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (Cornell University Press, 2007) and numerous articles including "The Pattern of Cruelty and the Cruelty of Pattern in Vladimir Nabokov" (The Cambridge Quarterly, 2006) and "Eichmann, Empathy, and LOLITA" (Philosophy and Literature, 2006).

Laura Frost is Associate Professor of Literature at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, where she teaches twentieth-century literature and culture. Her specialty is modernism with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. She is the author of Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism (Cornell University Press, 2001) and articles on James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Aldous Huxley, as well as pieces on contemporary culture, such as photography at Abu Ghraib. She is at work on a book about modernism and pleasure.

Neil Gordon is Professor of Writing and Dean of Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts. He is the author of Sacrifice of Isaac (Penguin, 2003), The Gunrunner's Daughter (Bantam, 2004), and The Company You Keep (Penguin 2004). He is the literary editor at The Boston Review and reviews regularly for The New York Times Book Review.

Terri Gordon is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at The New School. She has published articles on Josephine Baker, and on cabaret, film, and performance art in Nazi Germany. She is currently writing a book-length study of representations of the dancer in fin de sicle Paris.

Fred Hills was the Editor-in-Chief of McGraw-Hill and subsequently Vice President and Senior Editor at Simon and Schuster. He was Nabokov's editor in the last decade of his life and worked on The Annotated LOLITA (1970) and LOLITA: A Screenplay (1974), as well as seven other works including novels, short stories, and essays.

Sam Ishii-Gonzales is Visiting Principal Faculty in The New School's Bachelor's Program and the Department of Media Studies and Film. He is the co-editor of two books on Alfred Hitchcock, and has published articles on David Lynch, the painter Francis Bacon, and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, among others. He has several projects in the works, including a book entitled "Being and Immanence, or Non-Acting in the Cinema."

Nina Khrushcheva is Associate Professor in the Graduate Program of International Affairs at The New School. She is the author of Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics (Yale University Press, 2008) and is currently working on a book titled Russia's Gulag of the Mind.

Elizabeth Boyle Machlan is a Lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2004 and is currently at work on a book entitled "Panic Rooms: Architecture and Anxiety in New York from 1900 to 9/11."

Tanya Mairs teaches in the Department of Humanities at The New School, where she regularly offers a course on "Nabokov's LOLITA and Other Novels."  She is the translator of The Red Monarch by Yuri Krotkov.

Inessa Medzhibovskaya is Assistant Professor of Literature at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, where she teaches a variety of courses in Russian and Central East European Literature, theory of the novel, and movements such as romanticism and modernism. She is the author of Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time: A Biography of a Long Conversion, 1845-1887 (Lexington Books, 2008) and of numerous essays on Russian literature, culture, and intellectual history.

Dominic Pettman is Associate Professor of Culture and Media Studies at The New School. He is the author of After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion (SUNY, 2002) and Love and Other Technologies (Fordham, 2006), and co-author of Avoiding the Subject: Media, Culture and the Object (Amsterdam University Press, 2004).

Ellen Pifer is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Delaware, and she has written extensively on modern and contemporary fiction. Her publications on Nabokov range from Nabokov and the Novel (Harvard University Press, 1980) to Vladimir Nabokov's LOLITA: A Casebook (Oxford University Press, 2003) to numerous essays—the most recent of which appears in Approaches to Teaching Nabokov's LOLITA (Modern Language Association, 2008). Pifer's other books include Demon or Doll: Images of the Child in Contemporary Writing and Culture (University Press of Virginia, 2000), Saul Bellow Against the Grain (U of Pennsylvania P, 1990), and Critical Essays on John Fowles (Gale, 1986). A past-president of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society and a member of the Editorial Board of Nabokov Studies, she has lectured widely in Europe, America, Russia and Israel.

Robert Polito is Director of the Writing Program at The New School. His most recent books are the poetry collection Hollywood & God (forthcoming, Harvard University Press) and The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (forthcoming, Harvard University Press). He received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Savage Art: A Life of Jim Thompson (Vintage, 1996).

Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars (Random House, 2006) and a columnist for Slate, the online magazine. According to Dmitri Nabokov, one reason he finally made a decision about the fate of The Original of Laura was pressure resulting from Rosenbaum's columns in Slate on the subject. 

Val Vinokur is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Eugene Lang The New School for Liberal Arts. He is the author of The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas (Northwestern University Press, 2008). He co-translated (with Rose Rèjouis) two novels by Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo Magnificent and Texaco (Pantheon Books, 1997), and is a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow.

Lila Azam Zanganeh is a literary contributor to Le Monde and the editor of My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes: Uncensored Iranian Voices (Beacon Press, 2006). She is the author of a forthcoming book, Light of My Life - a combination of fiction and essay on happiness according to Vladimir Nabokov. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, and a host of other American and European publications.