Date/Time
Date(s) - 11/05/2026
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Location
4010 JFSB
Category(ies)
On Thursday, November 5th @ 3:30pm in 4010 JFSB, Michael Kelly will discuss Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as part of the Humanities Center’s Out of the Best Books series, considering the profound questions the novel raises about God, free will, suffering, and human responsibility.
Title: Out of the Best Books: Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
Out of the Best Books” is a new Humanities Center lecture series that invites faculty members from throughout the college to reflect on a literary work they regard as among the “best books.” Each month, a different scholar will introduce a foundational text, addressing whatever dimensions of the book most appeal to them (e.g, aesthetic quality, historical significance, spiritual dimensions, enduring capacity to shape human thought and experience, etc.). The series aims to foster broad conversations about the nature of literary excellence and the continuing relevance of great books in contemporary intellectual life.
About our presenter:
Michael Kelly teaches Russian in the Department of German and Russian. He has had numerous academic interests. After earning a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a master’s in public administration, he spent a few years working for the federal government in Washington, DC. However, Russian literature kept tugging at his heart, and he then did his graduate work in Russian literature at Ohio State University. Teaching is one of his great passions, and he has a deep love both for the Russian language and the literature. His research is focused on Nikolai Gogol, one of Russia’s greatest comic writers, as well as on Lev Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. He currently is working on an annotated translation of Gogol’s Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. He and his wife Lisa are the parents of six children, all of whom have studied Russian.
