Robert Wessling, PhD

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Robert Wessling is a Senior Lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences where he teaches general education courses as an OASIS program faculty member.  Dr. Wessling served as the Dean of Students at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and later at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.  He holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California at Berkeley and served as the Associate Director of Stanford’s Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies for many years.  He has published academic articles on Russian cultural history in the US, Canada, and Russia.

As a Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow at Stanford University, Dr. Wessling gained valuable experience teaching interdisciplinary humanities courses to first-year students.  In addition to teaching, Dr. Wessling has developed successful programs that have invigorated academic advising and residential life around the world.  At Stanford, he was appointed the first Academic Director of Stern Hall, and at the University of Macau, he served on the team that launched a comprehensive residential college system, the first of its kind in Asia.  While Associate Head of Choi Kai Yau College, he led an academic team that designed a first-year collegiate learning course focused on developing student competencies through active and experiential learning.

TEACHING INTERESTS

• Co-curricular learning (competencies, skills, and employment readiness)
• First-Year Experience seminars
• Interdisciplinary general education
• Literature and composition
• Russian literature and society

RESEARCH INTERESTS

• Co-curricular learning
• E-portolio and learning
• Russian literature and society

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

1. “The Kaleidoscope of 19th-Century Russian Literature and History,” HKUST Public Humanities Lectures, presented in the Lecture Hall of the Hong Kong Museum of History, November, 18, 2018.
2. “The History and Memory of WWII in Post-Soviet Russia,” Collegiate Learning Day Public Lecture, Anthony Lau Building Lecture Hall, the University of Macau, January 13, 2016.
3. “Assessing Key Competencies in the University of Macau’s Residential Colleges,” presented at the international conference Assessment for Learning in Higher Education, the University of Hong Kong, May 14, 2015.
4. “The Deaths of Nadson and Pushkin: ‘Chosen Trauma,’ Mediated Death, and the Poet of the ‘Sick Generation’” (in Russian), trans. by Julia Zarankin, Anna Bogdanova, and Polina Barskova. In Travma. Punkty, eds. Sergei Ushakin and Elena Trubinaya (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009), 439-483.
5. “Vsevolod Garshin, the Russian Intelligentsia, and Fan Hysteria.” In Madness and Madmen in Russian Culture, eds. Angela Brintlinger and Ilya Vinitsky (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2007), 75-89.