Name John Glad | Died December 4, 2015 | |
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Education New York University (1970) Books Jewish Eugenics, Future Human Evolution, Russia Abroad: Writers, History, Politics, Extrapolations from dystopia Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada Nominations National Book Award for Translation | ||
John Glad (December 31, 1941 – December 4, 2015) was an American academic who specialized in the literature and politics of exile, especially Russian literature. He had written about Nazi Germany, World War II and the Holocaust.
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Biography
John Glad was born in Gary, Indiana in a family of immigrants from Croatia. His surname in Croatian means "hunger". "I am Ivan Hunger", he used to tell his Russian colleagues.
At age of 17 he began studying Russian and spoke it fluently, which undoubtedly contributed to his marriage to Larisa, nee Romanova, whom he brought from Saratov. He was known as a very good interpreter, and as such he was invited to interpret speeches of high-ranking people from Russia, including Mikhail Gorbachev.
Glad received his MA from Indiana University in 1964 for his thesis "Constance Garnett and David Magarshack as translators of Crime and punishment.", and his Ph.D. degree from New York University in 1970 for his thesis "Russian Soviet science fiction and related critical activity".
Academic work
Glad was a professor of Russian studies at the University of Maryland, and had previously taught at Rutgers University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Iowa. He was also the Director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, D.C. (1982-1983), and a Guggenheim Grant recipient (1981). He had written for The Jewish Press, Mankind Quarterly and has been interviewed for The Occidental Quarterly. He was the translator from the Russian of The Black Book: The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders Throughout the Temporarily-Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the Death Camps of Poland During the War of 1941-1945., edited by Ilya Erenburg, and Vasily Grossman.
History of eugenics
Glad wrote two books on the subject of eugenics. Future Human Evolution: Eugenics in the Twenty-First Century advanced humanistic arguments in favour of universal eugenics and has been translated into twelve languages. His second book on the subject, Jewish Eugenics (2011) traced the interactions between Jewish thinkers and activists and eugenics.