George Gibian, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Russian Literature and Comparative Literature, was still an active member of the Cornell University faculty when he died at home in October 1999.
All events are free and open to the public.
Gibian joined the Department of Russian Literature at Cornell in 1961. He was chair of the department from 1963 to 1973, acting chair from 1978 to 1982 and chair of the Committee on Soviet Studies from 1966 to 1969 and again from 1981 to 1982. In all, he edited 20 books and published 90 articles, was a major translator of Russian dramatists of the absurd and also of the works of Jaroslav Seifert, the Czech Nobel Prize-winning poet. He received numerous awards, among them grants from the American Philosophical Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Guggenheim fellowship and a Fulbright research grant. Speakers will address literature, literary theory, linguistics and law and society.