Eugene Avrutin
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Professor of Modern Jewish history and the Tobor family scholar in the Program of Jewish Culture and Society
Eugene M. Avrutin is the author and co-editor of seven books, including Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia (Cornell University Press, 2010) and Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond: New Histories of an Old Accusation (Indiana University Press, 2017). Avrutin has published articles on documentation practices, the concept of race, and religious toleration and neighborly coexistence in the East European borderlands. His newest book, The Velizh Affair: Blood Libel in a Russian Town, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. He is at work on several projects: a short exploration of racial politics in modern Russia, and a longer book on crime, criminality, and neighborly relations in the borderlands. His scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.
Benjamin Balthaser
Indiana University South Bend
Associate Professor of English
Benjamin Balthaser’s scholarship, teaching, and creative work investigates the relationships among social movements, racial identity, and cultural production. His book from University of Michigan Press’ Class and Culture Series, Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War explores the connections between cross-border, anti-imperialist movements and the making of modernist culture at mid-century. Balthaser’s critical and creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals and publications such as American Quarterly, The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Reconstruction, Criticism, In These Times, Cultural Logic, Minnesota Review, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. He also published a collection of poems about Jewish victims of the blacklist titled Dedication, that appeared from Partisan Press in the fall of 2011.
Anindita Banerjee
Cornell University
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
Anindita Banerjee is an associate professor of Comparative Literature and the chair of humanities in the Environment and Sustainability Program at Cornell University. She is the author of We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity (Wesleyan UP, 2013), winner of the Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize, and an editor of three scholarly volumes: Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader (2018); Science Fiction Circuits of the South and East (2018); and South of the Future: Marketing Care and Speculating Life in South Asia and the Americas (forthcoming in 2020). Banerjee is a founding editor of the book series Studies in Global Science Fiction at Palgrave Macmillan, and a co-editor of the journal Science Fiction Film and Television at Liverpool University Press.
Jonathan Daly
Professor of History
University of Illinois at Chicago
Jonathan Daly teaches Russian, European, and world history, focusing on Western Civilization’s shaping of the modern world and the unequal struggle between the Russian state and society. Currently, Daly is writing an intellectual biography of historian and Sovietologist Richard Pipes. For this project, he has edited the correspondence of Pipes with another major Russian historian, Marc Raeff: Pillars of the Profession: The Correspondence of Richard Pipes and Marc Raeff (Brill, 2019).
Adrienne Edgar
University of California Santa Barbara
Associate Professor of History
Adrienne Edgar is associate professor of modern Russian and Central Asian history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a B.A. in Russian from Oberlin College, an M.A. in international affairs and Middle East studies from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Russian history from U.C. Berkeley. She has received research grants and fellowships from the International research and Exchanges Board (IREX), the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation) and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and has held post-doctoral and visiting scholar appointments at Harvard University, McGill University, the Alexander von Humboldt University (Berlin) and the University of Heidelberg (Germany). Edgar’s first book, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan, was published by Princeton University Press in 2004. She has just completed her second monograph, titled Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia. Edgar is co-editor, with Benjamin Frommer, of Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central Asia: Mixed Families in the Age of Extremes (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming June 2020). Edgar serves on the editorial board of Central Asian Survey and recently completed a three-year term on the board of directors of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES).
Leah Feldman
University of Chicago
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
Leah Feldman’s research explores the poetics and the politics of global literary and cultural entanglements, focusing critical approaches to translation theory, semiotics, Marxist aesthetics and postcolonial theory, which traverse the Caucasus and Central Asia. Her forthcoming book On the Threshold of Eurasia: Orientalism and Revolutionary Aesthetics in the Caucasus (Cornell UP, October 2018) exposes the ways in which the idea of a revolutionary Eurasia informed the interplay between orientalist and anti-imperial discourses in Russian and Azeri poetry and prose. Tracing translations and intertextual engagements across Russia, the Caucasus and Western Europe, it offers an alternative vision of empire, modernity and anti-imperialism from the vantage point of cosmopolitan centers in the Russian empire and Soviet Union. Her current research interests include affect in late-Soviet film and theatre from Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well as the rise of the New Right in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe and Eurasia.
Yevgeniy Fiks
Artist
Yevgeniy Fiks is a multidisciplinary, Post-Soviet conceptual artist. His medium includes painting, drawing, performance, and book arts. He was born in Moscow, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1972 and has been living and working in New York City since 1994. Fiks defines “the Post-Soviet artist” as one who has the responsibility to raise the proper understanding and critical reflection of Soviet history in order for Post-Soviet societies to move forward.[1] His works explore the dialectic between Communism and “the West” and are based on historical research, usually of forgotten and unresolved Cold War narratives. Some of these topics include the shared histories of the Red and Lavender Scares during the McCarthy era; Communism in Modern Art; and African, African-American, and Jewish Diasporas in the Soviet Union.
Jonathan Flatley
Wayne State University
Professor of English
Flatley’s work is about the ways that social and political forces work on and through affect. He is interested not only in representations of affective life but also in the way that aesthetic practices themselves create collective affective experiences, and, in so doing, also create modes of belonging and (in some instances) groups capable of action and opposition.
Ilya Gerasimov
Ilya Gerasimov is the Executive Director of Ab Imperio Quarterly.
Amelia Glaser
University of California San Diego
Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature
Director: Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (REEES) Program
Director: Jewish Studies Program
Amelia Glaser is a scholar of comparative literature, focusing on the intersections between Slavic and Jewish cultures, as well as on the literature of immigration to the US. She is the author of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (forthcoming with Harvard University Press in 2020). Her first monograph, Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands (Northwestern U.P., 2012) was a study of marketplace exchange in Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish fiction in the Ukrainian regions of the Pale of Settlement. Together with Steven S. Lee, she is the co-editor of Comintern Aesthetics (forthcoming in 2020 with U. Toronto Press). She is also the editor of Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford U.P., 2015), and the translator of Proletpen: America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets (U. Wisconsin Press, 2005). She is currently at work on a study of the reinvention of Ukrainian identity, in literature and performance, since 2014.
Sergey Glebov
Amherst College
Five College Associate Professor of History
Sergey Glebov is a historian of the Russian Empire/USSR, and received his Masters degree in Nationalism Studies from the Central European University in Budapest and his Ph.D. from Rutgers University. He holds a joint appointment in the History Departments of Amherst and Smith Colleges.
His research focuses on intellectual, political, and cultural history of the Russian empire and Soviet Union and on ideologies of imperial expansion, Russian nationalism and Russia’s nationalities. Sergey’s research into the history of the Eurasianist movement led him to explore connections between re-imaginings of Russian imperial space and the emerging structuralism in interwar Europe. He is also interested in the history of the Russian Empire in Siberia, the Far East, and North America, in particular in the interactions of native peoples and imperial structures, and in the history of missionary activities and scholarly exploration. He is a founding editor of Ab Imperio. Studies in New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space
Semion Goldin
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry, Administrative Director
Semion Goldin received his PhD cum laude from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His dissertation focuses on Russian government policy towards Jews from 1914 to 1917 and it appeared as monograph in 2017. He has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the University of Haifa and published a number of articles on various topics in Russian-Jewish history in the twentieth century. Semion Goldin is also a senior research fellow in the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for the Russian and East European Jewry. He is responsible for the programmatic development and administrative aspects of the Nevzlin Center’s activities.
Ghenwa Hayek is a scholar of modern Arabic literature from the late nineteenth century to the present. She works on the entangled relationships between literary and cultural production, space and place, and identity formation in the modern Arab Middle East, with a specific focus on Lebanon. She is interested in using the formal techniques of literary scholarship to nuance and complicate our understandings of the processes through which these dynamic cultures understand, represent, and position themselves in the world.
Faith Hillis
University of Chicago
Associate Professor of Russian History and the College
Faith Hillis is an historian of modern Russia, with a special interest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century politics, culture, and ideas. Her work explores how Russia’s peculiar political institutions—and its status as a multiethnic empire—shaped public opinion and political cultures. It also interrogates Russia’s relationship with the outside world, asking where the Russian experience belongs in the broader context of European and global history. In addition, she is interested in the theory and practice of the digital humanities.
Laura Hostetler
University of Illinois at Chicago
Professor of History
Director of Undergraduate Studies in History
Laura Hostetler’s research interests include the history of cartography, empire, and encounters between Europe and Asia, and in Spring 2016 she served as EDS-Stewart Endowed Chair in Chinese Western Cultural Relations at the Ricci Institute at the University of San Francisco. Her work deals, in particular, with imperial encounters and ethnography in a number of contexts. Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 2001), examines ethnographic representation in the context of colonial contacts between the Qing empire and culturally non-Chinese peoples residing in frontier areas of southwest China. The Art of Ethnography: A Miao Album of Guizhou Province (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), is a translation (co-authored with David M. Deal) of an ethnographic album produced during the eighteenth century that includes a substantial introductory essay on early modern ethnography in comparative historical perspective. She is translating the text of the Qing Imperial Illustration of Tributary Peoples with Prof. Wu Xuemei of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law.
Matthew Kendall
Assistant Professor of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies
University of Illinois at Chicago
Matthew Kendall’s recent research explores how techniques of listening influenced Russian writers and filmmakers. He is currently at work on a book-length project, tentatively titled Sound Works, which treats listening as a socially, historically, and culturally mediated act, and offers a history of sound reproduction’s impact on artists in the Soviet Union. His subjects all grappled with how to incorporate into Soviet art the chimerical technology of sound reproduction, which amplified state surveillance, facilitated archival preservation, motivated the production of astounding (and troubling) illusions, and smuggled foreign voices into Russia.
Alongside his research into the history of sound and listening, He has taught and written on topics ranging from the prose and poetry of Russian romanticism to 3D cinema and the politics of cinematic special effects.
Christina Kiaer
Northwestern University
Associate Professor of Art History
Christina Kiaer (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) teaches twentieth-century art, specializing in Russian and Soviet art, the politics of realism and the avant-garde, Comintern aesthetics, the visual culture of anti-racism, and feminist theory. Her first book Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (MIT Press, 2005) was awarded an Honorable Mention by the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. That year she also published an interdisciplinary volume of essays on Soviet cultural history, co-edited with Eric Naiman, on Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Indiana University Press). Her book Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. She is currently at work on the project “An Aesthetics of Anti-racism: African Americans in Soviet Visual Culture,” from which she has published the articles “Anti-racism in Early Soviet Visual Culture,” in “Black October: The Russian Revolution and the African Diaspora,” forum on Black Perspectives (online journal of the African American Intellectual History Society) in 2017 and “African-Americans in Soviet Socialist Realism: The Case of Aleksandr Deineka” in Russian Review in 2016; the essay “A Comintern Aesthetics of Anti-racism in the Animated Short Film Blek end uait” is forthcoming in the volume Comintern Aesthetics.
Psoy Korolenko
Songwriter and singer, performer, philologist and critic
Psoy Korolenko is a well-known songwriter and singer, performer, philologist and critic. According to his own definition, he is “a youth philologist, akyn, bodysinger and modern skomorokh”. He performs his own and others’ songs, accompanying himself to keyboard instruments, mainly a Casio sequencer in accordion timbre. Experimenting with quite various song traditions he sings in about 6 or 7 languages, most frequently in Russian, Yiddish, English and French. His original art mixture traces to the creative manners of Marx Brothers and Spike Jones, Yuriy Vizbor and Tiny Tim, intellectual comedy of Tom Lehrer, French chanson, Russian bard song and city romance, as well as the style of Jewish street musicians “Klezmer” and Russian rock. His role of modern skomorokh of the epoch “after postmodernism” allows him sneering at the passing away culture and at the same time imparting new energy and meaning to it. He regularly performs at club and university stages in Russia and abroad.
Michael Kunichika
Amherst College
Associate Professor of Russian; Director of the Amherst Center for Russian CultureD
Michael Kunichika’s research interests and specializations include twentieth century Russian and Soviet literature, in particular modernist tendencies; the cultural history and philosophy of archaeology and anthropology; critical theory; and interdisciplinary approaches to Russian and Soviet literary and visual culture. He is especially interested in exploring what links cultural production to the disciplines of archaeology, anthropology, and ethnography.
Steven Lee
University of California, Berkeley
Associate Professor of English
Lee’s research interests include twentieth-century American
literature, comparative ethnic studies, and Soviet and post-Soviet studies.
Lee was among the inaugural group of Fulbright students to conduct research in
the Central Asian Republics, where he compared Soviet Korean and Korean
American literatures and histories. He went on to receive my doctorate
from Stanford’s Modern Thought and Literature program, spent a postdoctoral
year at NYU’s Center for the United States and the Cold War, and began teaching
at Berkeley in 2009. He is also an affiliated faculty member at the Center for
Korean Studies and the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian
Studies.
Rama Mantena
University of Illinois at Chicago
Associate Professor of History
Rama Mantena’s research interests include colonial archives and the production of knowledge, historiography and the practices of history, and more recently public spheres, publicity and debates over civil society in Twentieth-century India. Her first book The Origins of Modern Historiography in India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) examines everyday practices surrounding acts of collecting, surveying, and antiquarianism in the early period of British colonial rule in India. By examining early imperial strategies of producing historical knowledge, the book traces the colonial conditions of the production of “sources,” the forging of a new historical method, and the ascendance of positivist historiography in nineteenth-century India. Her new book project, Political Futures and the Ends of Empire, aims to rethink the period between empire and nation, the early decades of the twentieth century, when the expansion of vernacular publics and cultures of democratic participation in defining and negotiating multifarious cultural identities ushered in a heightened era of liberalism and the increased use of the language of political rights and self-determination. The book is an attempt to braid together narratives of civil societal discussions on political life and citizenship with proposals of federated arrangements and calls for provincial autonomy using the particular case of the Princely state of Hyderabad and the emergence of provincial nationalism in neighboring Madras Presidency.”
Marina Mogilner
University of Illinois at Chicago
Associate Professor of History
Marina Mogilner’s field of specialization can be broadly defined as a New Imperial History of Russia and the USSR. She is interested in working with graduate students who intend to pursue research on the Russian empire and Soviet Union, comparative history of empires, nationalism, and racism, the history of science and ideas, and Russian/Eastern European-Jewish history.
In her first book, Mythology of the “Underground Man:” Russian Radical Microcosm in the Early Twentieth Century as an Object of Semiotic Analysis (Moscow, 1999), she traced the genesis, rise, and demise of the intellectual canon of Russian radicalism of the nineteenth−early twentieth centuries in its pan-imperial dimension. Her second book, Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia (Moscow, 2008), was the result of a decade of research in archives and libraries in five countries. As a history of Russian physical anthropology, it is also a revisionist reading of the Russian imperial experience that is often regarded as “premodern,” based on “non-Western” ideologies and practices that did not need “race” to legitimize regimes of difference and cultural and social stratifications. She is working on a book project dedicated to Jewish race scientists and intellectuals who, for different reasons and in different contexts, insisted that Jewishness was based on race. One line of my inquiry reconstructs the intellectual communicative space of Jewish race science—its international dimension as well as its specific Russian imperial version. Another line consists in revising Russian-Jewish political (Russian Zionism), cultural (literary and linguistic debates), and medical discourses and practices in the light of the racialized understanding of modern Jewishness.
William Nickell
University of Chicago
Associate Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
William Nickell is a cultural historian specializing in mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century Russia, with particular interest in the 1840s, turn-of-the century, and 1930s-40s. Before joining the University of Chicago he was the Gary Licker Research Chair at U.C. Santa Cruz. His research focuses on media studies and cultural production, with close attention to the effects of large-scale social, economic and technical change. He also publishes extensively on Tolstoy, including a forthcoming companion to War and Peace. His first book, The Death of Tolstoy: Russia on the Eve, Astapovo Station, 1910, received honorable mention for the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures.
Brigid O’Keeffe
Brooklyn College of the City University of New York
Associate Professor of History
Brigid O’Keeffe is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union. Her first book, New Soviet Gypsies: Nationality, Performance, and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2013. She is currently completing the manuscript for her second book, Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia, under contract with Bloomsbury.
David Rainbow
University of Houston
Honors College Faculty
David Rainbow is an assistant professor of history in the Honors College at the University of Houston. His research interests include Siberia in the late imperial period, regionalist and autonomist movements, Russia as a Pacific power, and the history of race in Russia. He edited and contributed to Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Perspective (McGill-Queens UP, 2019), and is working on a book about the history of Siberian regionalism from the 19th to the early 20th century.
Na’ama Rokem
University of Chicago
Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature & Comparative Literature
Na’ama Rokem works on Modern Hebrew and German-Jewish literature. Her first book, Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and Spaces of Zionist Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2013) argues that prose – as a figure of thought, a mode and a medium – played an instrumental role in the literary foundations of the Zionist revolution. She is now writing a book about the encounter between Paul Celan and Yehuda Amichai, as well as articles on multilingualism and translation in the works of Hannah Arendt and Leah Goldberg, on the politics of translation in Israel. With Amir Eshel, she coedited a special issue of Prooftexts, on German-Hebrew relations.
Dmitry Shumsky
Senior Lecturer in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Dr. Dmitry Shumsky is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Director of its Cherrick Center for the Study of Zionism, the Yishuv and the State of Israel. His recent book Beyond the Nation-State : The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion has appeared in 2018 with Yale University Press. His current research focuses on Stalin’s nationalities theory and politics, and the Soviet Jewish nationality.
Nariman Skakov
Stanford University
Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Director of Undergraduate Studies, Slavic Languages and Literatures
Nariman Skakov holds an MPhil degree in European Literature and a DPhil degree in Modern and Medieval Languages from the University of Oxford. His teaching and research interests lie primarily in 20th-century Russian/Soviet/Post-Soviet literature and culture. More specifically, they include Soviet Modernism, the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky and Rustam Khamdamov, Moscow conceptualism, and artistic visions of the Soviet Orient. His first monograph, The Cinema of Tarkovsky: Labyrinths of Space and Time, was published by I. B. Tauris in 2012. His articles appeared in Slavic Review, Russian Review, Dostoevsky Studies, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, and Новое литературное обозрение. He is currently working on a book dealing with late modernist experiments in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
Valeria Sobol
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Associate Professor and Head, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Valeria Sobol’s research interests include: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture, empire and the Gothic, literature and science/medicine, as well as Ukrainian literature. She is the author of Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination (2009); and a co-editor (with Mark Steinberg) of the volume Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe (2011). She has recently completed the book Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny (Northern Illinois UP, imprint of Cornell UP, forthcoming in fall 2020). Her next research project is a study of the discourse of race in post-reform Russian literature and journalism.
Charles Steinwedel
Northeastern Illinois University
Professor of History
Chairperson of the History Department
Charles Steinwedel’s areas of concentration are Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet history; Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century; Europe 1871-1919; and graduate courses on the Russian Revolution and European Empires. His Research Interests include Empire, nationality, and religion in late imperial Russia; Sugar and Power in Late Imperial Russia
Sonali Thakkar
University of Chicago
Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Department of Comparative Literature, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
Sonali Thakkar specializes in postcolonial literature and theory, and her current research focuses on the intersection of this field with Jewish studies, critical race studies, and human rights. The book she is writing, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and Plasticity in Postcolonial Politics, tells the story of how postwar attempts to redefine race in the aftermath of the Holocaust made ideas about Jewishness and Jewish racial difference central to anticolonial and postcolonial thought.
Vera Tolz
University of Manchester
Sir William Mather Professor of Russian Studies
Vera Tolz’s project ‘Reframing Russia for the global mediasphere: from the Cold War to “Information War”?’ aims to fill a major gap in our understanding of how Russian state-sponsored media shape, and are shaped by, a radically transformed global communication environment. Led by Professors Stephen Hutchings and Vera Tolz, the project is the first in-depth study of the role of the international broadcaster RT (Russia Today) in projecting Russia for international audiences.
Anna Elena Torres
University of Chicago
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
Anna Elena Torres’ research interests include: Yiddish Studies, Gender and women’s Studies, Anarchism and Labor History, Disability, Diaspora Studies, Religion, Indigenous Studies, and Translation.
She specializes in Jewish Studies, Gender Studies, and labor history, with particular attention to the subjects of statelessness, anti-statism, and borderlands literature.
Karen Underhill
University of Illinois at Chicago
Assistant Professor of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Karen Underhill’s areas of specialization include:Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity; Poland’s Multilingual and Pluralist Cultural Landscape; Yiddish Literature & Language; Polish Literary Modernisms; Polish/Jewish Culture and History / Polish-Jewish Relations; and Messianism in Romantic and Modern Literature & Philosophy. Her additional interests are the Democratic Transition in Central & Eastern Europe.
Julia Vaingurt
University of Illinois at Chicago
Associate Professor of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies and Director of Graduate Studies
Julia Vaingurt’s area of specialization is 20th century Russian literature and culture; Russian, European, and American Modernism and Avant-Garde. Her additional interests include 18th century Russian literature, 19th century Russian fiction, Russian-American cultural intersections, Russian-Jewish literature, technology and bioethics in literature, literary theory, and aesthetic theory.