Associate Professor of Russian & Comparative Literature
Fall 2025 office hours: Tuesdays 2:00-3:00 and Wednesdays 2:30-3:30
Prof. Corrigan teaches courses in Russian and comparative literature and in the Core Curriculum. He is interested in modern European literature and philosophy, with a special focus on the long nineteenth century in Russia leading up to the revolution of 1917.
His most recent book is Chekhov’s Antidotes (forthcoming with Stanford UP, 2026), a revaluation of Chekhov as a reparative moral philosopher. Chekhov wrote his stories and plays with an eye to looming revolution and civil war. He wrote diagnostically, studying the ways of polarization, sectarianism, apathy, and fanaticism that were driving his society towards self-destruction. The book considers Chekhov in this light, as a synthesizer of antidotes to gathering catastrophe, a pragmatic salvager who appraised the staggering wreck that was the modern world and, for lack of viable alternatives, considered how to improve and repair it.
Corrigan is also the author of Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self (Northwestern UP, 2017) and the editor of Chekhov in Context (Cambridge UP, 2023). His current project is a book titled Soul Geographers, a comparative study of literary attempts to map the unconscious in the nineteenth century, with chapters on Gogol, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche.
He was awarded the Neu Family Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2019 by the College of Arts and Sciences. In 2024, he won the Metcalf Cup and Prize for Excellence in Teaching.
Roundtable discussion, “Dostoevsky at 200,” Oxford University (May 2021)
Writ Large podcast episode, on Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov