As an undergraduate at Berkeley, Boris Rodin majored in Comparative Literature with a concentration on Russian and Classical literatures. His Slavic Honors Thesis, on Russian Formalist verse theory and the poetry of the Russian Romantic poet Fyodor Tiutchev, was submitted at the end of his sophomore year and a revised version has already been accepted for publication. He submitted his Classics Honors Thesis, a study of representation and epidemia in Pindar and Bacchylides, in November 2002. Continuing his education in Comparative Literature at Berkeley, Boris Rodin will pursue already well-established research interests in the production of the literary text (intertextuality, narratology, the agency of the lyric voice) and the positioning of literature as a social institution (genres, performance contexts and practices, interaction with ideological milieu). His mentor as a Discovery fellow will be Robyn Marasco, from the Department of Political Science, currently a Townsend Dissertation Fellow.