Bates College Professor Jane Costlow, a specialist in Russian literature and culture who travels frequently to Russia, will speak at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 15, at 161 Wood St., as part of Spiritual Sojourners, a series sponsored by the Office of the Chaplain at Bates College. The public is invited to attend free of charge. For more information, call the chaplain’s office at 207-786-8272.

Costlow was born and grew up on the coast of North Carolina, she says, “which means my first landscape was the ocean, that wonderful full emptiness of sounds and smells and endless horizon.”

The daughter of biologists, Costlow became an Episcopalian and grew interested in Russia. These experiences, she says, “contributed in some complicated way to where I am now.”

“My first ‘memory’ of Russia is of lying in bed at night imagining the plane in the distance was the Russians coming to get us. Must have been 1962, and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Costlow recalls. “Years later I spent an academic year in what was still Leningrad. I learned Russian. Demonstrated against nuclear weapons. Worked in a soup kitchen. Wondered if I really wanted to be an academic.”

After coming to Bates, marrying and having children, Costlow and her family settled in Auburn. “From where I live,” she says, “you can see out over the Androscoggin towards Lewiston and Bates. The steeple of Trinity Episcopal Church is just visible, and the amazing skies roll in from Canada. I’m ‘living in the question’ — with deep gratitude for languages and landscapes.”

Each speaker in this series has a story to tell, says its organizer Bates College Chaplain Bill Blaine-Wallace. The speaker’s personal sojourns serve as “starter dough” for conversation, Blaine-Wallace says.

Costlow’s talk, the fifth in the series, will be followed by three additional 90-minute presentations throughout the balance of the academic year. Each talk begins at 4:30 p.m.

Ghosts from Japan and England will share the podium at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 27, in the Benjamin Mays Center, Bates College, when an associate professor of English literature at the University of Kyoto contrasts traditional Japanese ghosts with the spirits in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Professor Toru Sasaki also will participate in a panel discussion titled “Translations East and West” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 30, in Chase Hall Lounge, Campus Avenue, Bates College. Both events are free and open to the public.

Sasaki has published widely, and his works in English include articles about Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and other Victorian authors. He has edited several English-language volumes by 19th-century authors, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s John Marchmont’s Legacy.

The Oct. 30 panel presentation,  a conversation among scholars, students and the audience, will look at the process of translating literature and at political and economic factors that influence translation and publication. For the discussion, joining Sasaki will be Jane Costlow, professor of Russian and environmental studies and the Christian A. Johnson Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Bates College; Melissa Wender, assistant professor of Japanese, Bates College; and Tamae Prindle, Oak Professor of East Asian Language and Literature, Colby College.

Sasaki is the guest of Bates Professor of English Lillian Nayder, who met the Japanese scholar in his country when she delivered a series of lectures on Catherine Dickens, the harried wife of well-known Victorian author Charles Dickens. While at Bates, Sasaki will work with students in two of  Nayder’s courses, “Dickens Revisited” and “Mary Elizabeth Braddon.”

Sasaki’s Bates visit is sponsored by the Freeman Foundation, the Tanaka Memorial Foundation, the Mellon Learning Associates Program in the Humanities and the Department of English.

Costlow, professor of Russian and East Asian languages and literature, is the inaugural Christian A. Johnson Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies. Parakilas, professor of music, is the inaugural James L. Moody Jr. Family Professor of Performing Arts.The Johnson Professorship is funded through a $1.2-million grant from the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation of New York City. As Harward says, “it recognizes the ever-increasing connections among academic disciplines. It brings a new level of visibility and confidence in the value of taking research and teaching wherever they lead, even when beyond the boundaries of established fields of study.” The Johnson Professorship in Interdisciplinary Studies is held for a four-year term. The Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation was incorporated in 1952 in New York with funds donated by Christian A. Johnson, a Swedish immigrant who eventually became a prominent financier and industrialist.

A member of the Bates faculty for 15 years, Costlow has been a full professor since 1999. She is the author of two books on Russian literature and was recently awarded a Phillips Faculty Fellowship funding her studies in Russia.

Costlow graduated summa cum laude from Duke University in 1976 and received her doctorate in Slavic languages and literatures from Yale University in 1987. She is the author of Worlds Within Worlds: The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (Princeton University Press 1990) and co-editor of Representations of the Body and Sexuality in Russian Culture (Stanford University Press 1998).

Costlow’s research includes examining the significance of the forest in Russian culture, as a source of legend and an economic resource, as well as an historic place of refuge and resistance. She is studying the role and representation of the forest in Soviet and World War II-era partisan activity in Bryansk Forest and in current projects to create a national park in a Taiga forest area of central Russia.

Her translation of The Tragic Menagerie, a recently rediscovered piece of Russian literature, received critical acclaim from both The New York Times and the New Yorker and garnered a 1999 prize for best translation from Russian/East European languages by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. Costlow’s introduction won the 1997 Heldt Prize for best essay in Slavic women’s studies. The Johnson Professorship is the only chair at Bates specifically devoted to interdisciplinary studies.

The Moody Professorship was established through a $1.5-million endowment gift from James L. Moody ’53, chair of the Board of Fellows at Bates and retired CEO and chairman of Hannaford Bros. Co. The professorship reflects the Moody family’s interest in the performing arts. James Parakilas has taught at Bates since 1979. He was chair of the Humanities division from 1996 through 2000 and is currently the chair of the department of Music. He graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College in 1970, received his master’s degree in music history from the University of Connecticut in 1975 and his doctorate in musicology from Cornell University in 1979.

Parakilas is the author of many articles and four books on music, including Ballads Without Words: Chopin and the Tradition of the Instrumental Ballade (Amadeus Press 1992). Most recently, in celebration of the 300th anniversary of the piano, Parakilas co-wrote and edited Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano, (Yale University Press 1999).

An exploration of the musical and social roles played by the piano in its long history, Piano Roles received glowing praise from the New Yorker, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Parakilas, who teaches a Bates course “The Piano as a Culture Machine,” writes in the introduction to his book: “The piano is the instrument, the product, around which the modern entertainment industry was created.”

Parakilas’ essay “Nuit plus belle qu’un beau jour’: Piano, Song and the Voice in the Piano Nocturne received the 1999 Wilk Prize, awarded annually by the Center for Polish Music Studies at the University of Southern California.

There are more than 21 endowed professorships at Bates, recognizing the academic qualities of its faculty and the generosity of donors to the College.

Taught by Jane Costlow, professor of Russian, the environmental studies course explores a cross-cultural perspective on literature and the environment. Students read a broad range of novels and poetry about individuals’ strong connections with place and community. “I wanted the Bates students to understand that those connections with place also exist in Lewiston-Auburn, where we have our ‘elders’ with stories to tell and wisdom to share.” Many of the Lewiston-Auburn residents interviewed for the project discussed places where they spent much of their childhood.

The two-hour presentation, to which all those interviewed have been invited, will be made in the form of posters. The taped interviews ultimately will be housed in the Lewiston and Auburn public libraries as well as Bates College Special Collections. “Hopefully, they will be resources in the future for people interested in the history of the area,” Costlow said.

According to Costlow, the book, just republished in Russia, is one of the great forgotten works of pre-revolutionary Russia, the story of a young girl between the ages of eight and 14 as she “comes to an awareness of herself and the world around her,” Costlow said.

Costlow also has translated the novel into English, to be published in 1998 by Northwestern University Press. She decided to translate the work after using a few chapters in a Russian literature class at Bates, where themes of girlhood and environmental issues resonated with students. A member of the Bates faculty since 1986, Costlow graduated from Duke University and received master’s and doctoral degrees from Yale University. She lives with her family in Auburn.

Hosted by the Bates College Department of German, Russian and East Asian Languages and Literatures, the gathering will be held in the Multicultural Center on the corner of Campus Avenue and Franklin Street.

The women’s visit, part of an internship with the Counterpart Foundation and the Women’s Business Development Foundation, will include stops at various local organizations to observe different styles of advocacy, development and delivery of services, according to Jane Costlow, associate professor of Russian at Bates.