Ilya Vinitsky is Professor of Russian literature in the Slavic Department at Princeton University. His main fields of expertise are Russian Romanticism and Realism, the history of emotions, and nineteenth- century intellectual and spiritual history. His books include Vasily Zhukovsky’s Romanticism and the Emotional History of Russia (Northwestern University Press, 2015), Ghostly Paradoxes: Modern Spiritualism and Russian Culture in the Age of Realism (Toronto University Press, 2009; Choice Magazine’s list of Outstanding Academic Titles for 2010) and A Cultural History of Russian Literature, co-written with Andrew Baruch Wachtel (Polity Press, 2009). He also co-edited Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2007) and published a chapter on the history of madness in literature and art in the recent Routledge History of Madness & Mental Health. His most personal book, The Count of Sardinia: Dmitry Khvostov and Russian Culture (New Literary Observer, 2017; in Russian) investigates the phenomenon of anti-poetry in Russian literary tradition from the 18th through the 21st century and focuses on the literary biography and cultural function of the king of Russian bad poets, Count Dmitry Khvostov. This book received a 2018 Marc Raeff's Book Prize of the Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies Association.

In 2019 Vinitsky received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his project of a comprehensive study of political and literary activities of Ivan Narodny (Jaan Siboul), a Russian-Estonian expat writer, art critic, and con-man, who lived in America from 1906 until his death in 1953 and was labeled by FBI as “the worst fraud that ever came out of Russia. His most recent book on translation as provocation was published in Moscow in January 2022.

Vinitsky has taught a variety of classes on Russia and the West, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Russian thinkers, criminals and justice in literature, spiritualism and literature, and history of emotions. In 2010 he received the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences Ira Abrams Award for Distinguished Teaching.