Kelly Herold did her undergraduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, receiving a B.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures and History in 1989. She received the M.A. and Ph.D. from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UCLA in 1993 and 1998 respectively. Her research interests include Franco-Russian literary connections (1750-1830) and Russian prose from the same period (including memoir and travel writing, journalism, essays, fiction, and correspondence). She has spent several summers, a spring and two winters in Russia. Her research on memoir and travel writing has taken her to Dublin, London and Prague. She has written commentary to Sumarokov's Ody torzhestvennye ( included in a facsimile edition, a project directed by Ronald Vroon and E.P. Mstislavskaia). A recent publication was "Cultural References, Semantic Shifts, and Literary Myth in Nabokov's Autobiographies," in From the Other Shore: Russian Writers Abroad Past and Present. Most recently, Kelly has been working on children's literature, and will present her work on a panel at the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies Annual Convention in Fall, 2006.


Kelly has been at Grinnell since 1997, and was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in Spring 2004. She has chaired the Linguistic Concentration Committee, and has long taught the foundation course, "Introduction to General Lingustics." She has directed numerous linguistics senior MAPs, and has also advised several independent linguistics majors. She has been chair of the Committee to Foster Foreign Languages, and has been active in teaching our first- and second-year language courses, as well as literature in translation, including courses on Nabokov and Tolstoy.

Most recently, Kelly has been doing research in the area of children's literature, and has taught two tutorials devoted to this topic (2007 and 2008). She will co-teach a special topics course on children's literature with Raquel Greene next year.