Inga Vidugirytė-Pakerienė is an Associate Professor at the Department of Russian Philology of Vilnius University. Her main field of research is Russian literature of the beginning of the 19th century, Russian romanticism, and intersections of geography and literature. The topics of geography of literature and geographic imagination brought her to the interdisciplinary research of literature and other arts in regard to geographic discourse as well as to the studies of geographic aspects of Lithuanian culture.
Inga considers the creative work of Nikolai Gogol as the main source of her scientific inspiration. Gogol’s comic stories and plays had inspired her previous anthropological interest in literature that resulted in a book for students The Culture of Laughter published in Lithuanian (Vilnius University Press, 2012). In the same way, Gogol’s landscapes and their geographic features suggested her to use geocritical approach to literature. Her book Geographic Imagination. Gogol (in Russian) examines the Russian geographical discourse of the romantic epoch and its traces in Gogol’s creative work as well as the traces of geographic visuality in Gogol’s art of representation a landscape in literature.
In the years 2011 – 2015 Inga was leading a project “Geography of literature: textual territories and imaginary maps” (see page “Projects”). During the project, she had to embark into creating of literary maps using GIS which was a challenge to a researcher of literature as well as a source of excitement of new technologies and scientific discoveries. Some maps are published in her book Geographic Imagination. Gogol: they represent such aspects of Gogol’s geography as his traveling, and the cartographic narrative of Gogol’s story Rome.