Cathy Popkin is Jesse and George Siegel Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Columbia University.  She is the author of The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol, editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories, and co-editor of Teaching Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature: Essays in Honor of Robert L. Belknap. She has also published a range of influential articles on Chekhov and the medical sciences.