Charlotte Rosenthal Receives Whiting Grant
October 6, 2010
University of Southern Maine Professor of Russian Charlotte Rosenthal, a resident of Cape Elizabeth, received a Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation Grant that allowed her to go to Stockholm, Sweden and St. Petersburg, Russia this summer. The Whiting Foundation, which is based in Boston, awards fellowships to present and prospective teachers with emphasis on teachers at the college level, enabling recipients to study abroad.
While in Stockholm last July, Rosenthal presented a paper titled, “‘Mom Lit’ in the Silver Age: Representations of Motherhood in Anastasiia Verbitskaia and Her Contemporaries” as part of the panel, “Representations of Motherhood in Russian Literature: 1885-2008,” at the International Council for Central and East European Studies VIII World Congress.
Rosenthal subsequently spent the month of August in St. Petersburg where she completed research on her book about Verbitskaia, Knitting the Brows: Anastasiia Verbitskaia’s Life and Careers. Verbitskaia wrote prose fiction, popular novels, and movie scripts and was widely read in Russia prior to World War I. Most of Verbitskaia’s writing centers on the conflicts surrounding work, love, sexuality and motherhood faced by the modern woman.
