Each discussion is hosted in a Facebook Group, you do not need to have a Facebook account to access the groups.
Facebook recently changed its settings, and unfortunately, public groups like ours are no longer viewable without a Facebook account. We’re looking into alternative ways to share information about the group outside of Facebook, and we appreciate your patience as we explore solutions.
You may also view Anna’s posts at annasthinkingcap.substack.com
Our current project:
100 Days of Alexandre Dumas’ Twenty Years After
Past books and projects:
100 Days of Jókai Mór
100 Days of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment
100 Days of Charming Rotten Scoundrels
100 Days of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
100-ish Days of Lord Byron
30 Days of Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary
100 Days of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables
100 Days of Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo
50 Days of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black
10 Days of Balzac’s Colonel Chabert
10 Days of Gilgamesh
50 Days of Paradise Lost
100 Days of The Brothers Karamazov
100 Days of War and Peace
100 Days of Decameron
A native speaker of Russian and Hungarian, Professor Anna Barker completed her PhD in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at the University of Iowa in 2002 and teaches in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Russian Program. Her current courses include Introduction to Russian Culture, Russian Literature in Translation, and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Her main areas of interest are the Napoleonic era; 19th-century Russian and European literature, history, and culture; translation; women writers and artists; and opera. In commemoration of the upcoming bicentennial of Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Professor Barker is curating the exhibition From War and Peace to Anna Karenina: Tolstoy at 200 at the University of Iowa Main Library Gallery (Fall, 2028) and preparing the publication of Twenty Tales from Tolstoy: For the Young and the Young at Heart (Ice Cube Press, 2028). Her translations and literary criticism have appeared in 91st Meridian, International Accents, and Women and Translation (University of Ottawa Press, 2011).
In 2025 she was invited to give a talk at the 22nd International Napoleonic Congress in Paris, France and present as a keynote speaker at the Napoleonic Historical Society Conference in San Diego, California. Her extensive Napoleonic research is highlighted in her upcoming book 13 Notes from Napoleon, Iowa: Musings on the Edge of the French Empire (Ice Cube Press, 2025).
A 2011-2014 Research Fellow at the UI Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, Professor Barker has given presentations on Russian literature and translation at numerous conferences, including at Yasnaya Polyana, the Tolstoy Literary Estate and Museum, Tula Region, Russia. In 2021 she initiated a Russian literature lecture series, Russian Literary Journeys with Anna, at the Minneapolis Museum of Russian Art. Her lectures on Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky have been attended by hundreds of literature enthusiasts.
In collaboration with the UI Libraries Special Collections, Professor Barker curated the exhibitions Goya’s Disasters of War and Tolstoy’s War and Peace: A Dialogue Between Art and Literature (2019) and From Revolutionary Outcast to a Man of God: Dostoevsky at 200 (2021). The Dostoevsky exhibition attracted over 6,000 visitors.
Professor Barker publishes essays and literary commentary on Substack – her guided readings dedicated to the exploration of world literature in a historical and cultural context can be found at Anna’s Thinking Cap. Her 2024-2026 Substack commentary focuses on the works of Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons), Dumas (The Three Musketeers and its sequels), and Jókai Mór (The Heartless Man’s Sons or A kőszívű ember fiai).
Since 2020, Professor Barker has offered 17 online tutorials guiding a global community of readers through literary classics such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, Paradise Lost, Madame Bovary, Les Misérables, War and Peace, and The Brothers Karamazov. Notably, her 2021 War and Peace tutorial reached thousands of readers on 5 continents, 25 countries, with participants reading the novel in 9 languages. Her tutorials have reached over 10,000 readers around the globe.
She writes Anna’s Thinking Cap, a monthly Iowa City Press-Citizen column, focusing on Iowa’s French and Napoleonic past, Iowa history, and 19th century European and US history.
Her opera reviews are published in the London-based Opera Magazine.
The Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature is a 501(c)3 organization, and welcomes your charitable gifts. Through programs like the Iowa City Book Festival, One Book Two Book Children’s Literature Festival, and MusicIC, we have encouraged families, businesses and community organizations to discover Iowa as a place that invites people – both locally and globally- to discover and share our many literary resources and opportunities. Your gift helps the UNESCO City of Literature achieve our goal to support and create the highest quality literary programming and to engage youth and families in reading and writing.
