After defending his PhD dissertation “Dostoevsky’s Engagement of Russian Intellectuals in the Question of Russia and Europe: From Winter Notes on Summer Impressions to The Devils” at Brown University, he has written articles on Dostoevsky’s literary relationship to the work and persona of Nikolai Karamzin and Denis Fonvizin, on the novelist’s use of everyday objects in descriptions of fantastical events, and on religious wandering (strannichestvo) in Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent. Professor Arndt has also explored and written on religious wanderers as a theme in the works of several other nineteenth-century Russian authors and has produced an article on Nikolai Leskov’s use of hagiographical devices. He is deeply interested in the inclusion of mythological space in descriptions of wanderers in Russian nineteenth-century literature.