Jonathan Bolton is professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard University. He teaches Czech and Central European culture from the medieval period to the present, and his research has tended to cross back and forth between literary studies and history. He has edited and translated In the Puppet Gardens: Selected Poems, 1963–2005 (2007) by the Czech poet Ivan Wernisch. His most recent work, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism (Harvard University Press, 2012), offers a new approach to Central European dissent that focuses on the everyday experiences of dissidents, paying special attention to samizdat, literary institutions, and first-person writing in the creation of dissident identities.
