Finals season at Boston College means many things. Attending last lectures, cramming for exams, and rushing through long-procrastinated term papers are on everyone’s minds. Worrying about a final paper’s legacy and life beyond the end of the semester, however, is usually not.

But for students who have taken part in a literature seminar taught by Maxim D. Shrayer, chair of the department of Eastern, Slavic, and German studies at BC, term papers are not always a hurried two-week enterprise to earn a passing grade. Sometimes, they are a labor of love that leaves a scholarly mark.

BC faculty, alumni, and students celebrated the launch of Nabokov on the Heights: New Studies from Boston College on Wednesday. The volume is a collection of works written by BC students who have taken Shrayer’s literature seminar on the life and work of prominent Russian American writer Vladimir Nabokov.

The launch featured a panel of contributors to the collection hosted by Shrayer, its compiler and editor. The panel was part of a Dean’s Colloquium lecture series held by the office of Gregory Kalscheur, S.J., the dean of the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences.

The collection offers unique perspectives and new insights into Nabokov’s writing as researched by BC faculty and students. Many of them, like panelist Nina Khaghany, BC ’24, were undergraduates when their pieces were written. Her contribution to the collection is original research on connections to James Joyce’s Ulysses in Nabokov’s writing.

“I’m so grateful to be a part of this project that attempts to bring the voices of undergraduates, graduate students, and professors together to capture a moment in time when we were all thinking of Nabokov in the context of our lives but also attempting to leave a lasting impact on Nabokov studies,” said Khaghany.

Although Khaghany recently earned her master’s degree in comparative literature at Columbia University, the panelists’ breadth of interests in literature and other fields proved that there is no single path to creating impactful scholarly work.

Also on the panel was Matthew Lyberg, BC ’00, the global head of AI, Asset Management & Product at Manulife Wealth & Asset Management. Although he did not continue to study literature after BC, he found meaning in his research on Nabokov’s time in Boston, done through a photo essay completed over 20 years ago, when he took the first iteration of the Nabokov seminar in 2000.

“What did it mean to be a scholar? For me, that first thesis was something that I had to do that was a requirement for the honors program, and it was a bit of a drudgery,” said Lyberg, referring to the thesis he had intended to write as a Russian major but never began.

Lyberg described approaching his advisor, Shrayer, in a situation most students have experienced at some point in their academic careers: with a deadline looming and little to show for it. With Shrayer’s help, he turned his nonexistent thesis into an entirely new project.

“It was like, just this unbelievable feeling of energy and hope and excitement, and that is what I learned about scholarship in this project,” said Lyberg. “It has to be something that is pulling you, that you have to get out, that you want to do, that you want to pursue.”

Literary scholarship can take many forms, but as Lyberg noted, it requires passion and curiosity, whether for a language, place, or creative pursuit.

For BC English professor Eric Weiskott, his contribution was born out of another project comparing motifs in contemporary poetry with his own field of expertise: 14th-century poetry and literature.

“I thought, ‘I’ll read a couple that have a lot of these motifs in them,’ but in fact, motifs spider out through his whole work,” said Weiskott. “At any rate, I couldn’t stop reading the novels.”

Weiskott became engrossed in the world of Nabokov’s writing. He was especially fascinated by his transition from Russian to English writing in the middle of his career.

Even within his single chapter in the collection, Weiskott demonstrates just a few of the many ways a single scholarly topic can be approached by people from different backgrounds and disciplines.

“I think Nabokov does not just attract translinguals and immigrants, it also attracts people who think of scholarship as the flip side of creative writing and vice versa,” said Shrayer.

Panelist Katie Pelkey, GMCAS ’23, discussed the effect her Nabokov research has had on her own creative pursuit: poetry. As a creative writer, legacy is important, and Nabokov on the Heights both discusses the concept of literary legacy and leaves one of its own.

“He’s sort of anticipating his own literary legacy by making his characters sort of transcend time,” said Pelkey. “So in that same way, his books, just evidenced by the fact that we’re all here talking about them today, sort of go beyond time and allow him to continue to be alive.”