Maire Jaanus

Background

Ethnicity: Mother and Father and grandparents, great-grandparents also Estonian

Jaanus was born on January 22, 1940 in Tartu, Estonia; the daughter of Richard Jaanus and Hedda Podrang. She came to the United States in 1950.

Education

Her elementary school education began in Bad Kissingen, Germany and lasted for 3 and a half years. In America, she attended P.S.20 in the Bronx in NYC. After grade 6, she entered a special NYC Rapid Advance class at Herman Rider Junior HighSchool in which the class covered the 3 year required program in 2 years. Thereafter, she was accepted to Hunter College High School and graduated 12th in her class in 1957.



Jaanus received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Vassar College in 1961, graduating 1st in her class. She spent her Junior Year, 1959-60, at the University of Munich in Germany. In 1961-2, she studied on a Fulbright in Cambridge University, England. Six years later, in 1968, she earned her Doctor of Philosophy degree in Comparative Literature (English, German, French, Estonian, Latin) from Harvard University.

Career

Jaanus began her career as a teacher at Harvard University in 1963 and held it for a year. In 1965, she took a position of a professor at Julliard School of Music, where she served until 1966. Then in 1968, Maire was appointed a professor at the University of Illinois. The same year she became an instructor in English at Barnard College.

In 1969, Jaanus held the position of an assistant professor at Barnard College. Also she served as an associate professor at the same college from 1976 to 1981. Since 1981 she has been a professor of English and comparative literature at the same college. Also Maire taught a course on Reading Lacan and Literature at Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She taught the upper level 19th and 20th century Humanities courses at Columbia College for several decades.

Achievements

• Jaanus is known for her books, including "She", "Literature and Negation" and "Georg Trakl". She received the First Prize in the Woodrow Wilson National Humanities Series Proposal Competition in 1972.

Works

More photos

• book

  • She

    (A successful, married forty-year-old woman becomes increa...)

    1984
  • Literature and Negation 1979
  • Georg Trakl (Essays on Modern Writers) 1974

Membership

Jaanus is a member of American Association of University Professors, American Association of University Women, Modern Language Association, PEN International, The Author's Guild, Inc., Estonian Learned Society and Phi Beta Kappa.

Connections

In June 1962 Maire Jaanus married Edward W. Said, with whom she divorced in 1970. Then in 1970, she married Juhan Kurrik, with whom she divorced in 1984. They have a child. On September 3, 1988 Maire married Michael E. Brown and their marriage lasted twelve years.

Father:

Richard Jaanus

Head of the Tartu Telephone & Telegraph system in Estonia;

Estonian nationalist; arrested in April 1941 by the Communists and died in the Kolyma Slave Labor Prison Camp, described as "the most frigid and deadly outpost of Stalin's gulag," in 1942.

Mother:

Hedda Podrang

child:

Ilomai C. (Kurrik) Jaanus

She has 3 children as beautiful, gifted, bright as are the sun, the sea, pine woods, and violets -- and as natural.

First husband:

Edward W. Said

Second husband:

Juhan Kurrik

Third husband:

Michael E. Brown