Organizers
Bradley A. Gorski is an Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages at Georgetown University where he teaches a range of courses on Russian and comparative literature, film, and culture. His research focuses on the post-Soviet period, specifically, the effects of capitalist markets and international circulation on contemporary Russian literature and culture. He is currently finishing a manuscript tentatively titled Cultural Capitalism: Literature and Success after Socialism. His previous publications have touched on topics such as late-Soviet subcultures, Russian neo-medievalism, and Vladimir Sharov’s poetics of truth.
Philip Gleissner is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. His current book project Soviet Circulations: Print Periodicals and the Space of Socialist Literature is a study of literary culture under late socialism through the lens of literary magazines. Besides periodical studies, his research has been guided by a strong interest in the migration of cultural forms and their interplay with social power structures, experiences of identity, and national politics. His current digital humanities project titled Reading through the Iron Curtain traces the official circulation of literature in translation in socialist Eastern Europe.
Participants
Katerina Clark, a native of Australia, has taught at SUNY Buffalo, Wesleyan University, the University of Texas at Austin, Indiana University and Berkeley. Her present book project, tentatively titled Eurasia without Borders?: Leftist Internationalists and Their Cultural Interactions, 1917–1943, looks at attempts in those decades to found a “socialist global ecumene,” which was to be closely allied with the anticolonial cause. Ecumene here is taken in the modern sense to mean a far-flung or world-wide community of people committed to a single cause and engaged in discussions, lobbying and writing or filmmaking aimed at working towards a commons, at generating a common discourse, in this instance largely a Marxist-based one. The book looks at the interactions during the inter-war years of European culture producers with counterparts in Asia, principally in Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, Northern India, China, Japan and Mongolia. It analyses works generated in the name of this common cause as it follows the evolution of the putative ecumene over two decades.
Irina Denischenko is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. Her work focuses on 20th-century literature, art, critical theory, and women’s history in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Russia, Czechia, and Hungary. Irina has published articles on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of cognition and Czech avant-garde photopoetry, as well as a number of book reviews and translations. She is currently completing her book manuscript on Vladimir Mayakovsky and the politics of aesthetic form, which examines the lyric’s capacity for democratic representation alongside theories of the novel and feminist-posthumanist thought. Irina is also currently co-editing a collection of critical articles on Dada in Central and Eastern Europe and a volume of new Bakhtin translations. She holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.
Milla Fedorova graduated from Moscow State University where she studied Russian Literature and Language. She wrote her Doctoral thesis on Russian Postmodernist Poetry in 2000. Before joining the Slavic Languages Department at Georgetown in 2006, she taught courses in Russian Language and Culture at University of Illinois at Chicago. Her area of expertise is Russian twentieth century literature (including its marginal genres, such as sci-fi and crime fiction), film, and Internet. She is especially interested in intertextual relations: in the texts she studies, she searches for patterns and unexpected connections that sometimes go beyond the twentieth century. She researched Hoffman’s subtexts in Dostoevsky, M. Bulgakov’s argument with Tolstoy, Rousseau’s influence on Pushkin. Her book Yankees in Petrograd, Bosheviks in New York (DeCalb: NIU Press, 2013) examines the myth of America as the Other World in Russian literature and film. Currently, Fedorova is working on a project dedicated to Chicago: her next book will ”read” the city, its history, architecture and culture through the prism of texts about the city, including but not limited to those by Russian writers.
Helen Fehervary is Professor Emerita /Academy Professor of German Studies at the Ohio State University. She has published extensively on twentieth-century German literature, theater, and intellectual history, and the works of Anna Seghers, Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Mȕller, and Christa Wolf. She has co-translated plays by Müller and stories by Seghers. She is general editor, with Carsten Jakobi of the Universität Mainz, of the multi-volume text-critical and annotated Anna Seghers Werkausgabe (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag) of which twelve volumes have appeared thus far.
Michael Kunichika
Elena Ostrovskaya
Serguei Oushakine teaches anthropology and Slavic studies at Princeton. Lately, he has been spending way too much time worrying about the intellectual legacy of Russian Formalists and Constructivists. Otherwise, he works on a book-length project about the early Soviet optical turn, using illustrated children’s books as his primary example. He is also finishing a manuscript about Postcolonies of Communism, which explores the cultural and intellectual contexts of new, post-communist, sovereignties.
Katherine Hill Reischl is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages of Literatures at Princeton University. She has published articles on the digital mediation of avant-garde journals and broadly on the materiality of photography at the intersections of literary and visual culture. Her first book, Photographic Literacy: Cameras in the Hands of Russian Authors, was published by Cornell University Press in 2018. She has a multi-faced ongoing project on the visualities of Soviet youth culture and a new monograph in progress dedicated to late and post-Soviet color.
Tatsiana Shchurko is a researcher and feminist activist from Belarus. Currently, Tatsiana is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Ohio State University.
Elizabeth H. Stern is a dance historian and classically trained ballet dancer. She received her doctorate from Princeton University for a dissertation on Stalinist drambalet and its East German and contemporary reverberations. She currently lives in Heidelberg, Germany.
Kimberley St. Julian-Varnon is a history Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work examines how Black experience in the Soviet Union shaped Black identity, and how the presence of people of color affected ideas and understandings of race, ethnicity, and nationality policy in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet space. Her public writing analyzes the linkages of race, foreign policy, and culture in the United States, Russia, and Ukraine.
Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He has held visiting appointments at universities in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. He is the author of five monographs, including The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford UP, 2019). Tihanov’s research interests range from Russian, German, and Central-European intellectual history to world literature, cultural theory, cosmopolitanism, and exile. He is elected member of Academia Europaea, past president of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory, and member of the Executive Board of the Institute for World Literature (IWL) at Harvard University; he is also honorary scientific advisor to the Institute of Foreign Literatures, CASS (Beijing). He is currently writing Cosmopolitanism: A Very Short Introduction, commissioned by Oxford UP.
Edward Tyerman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include early Soviet culture, Soviet internationalism, cultural connections and exchanges between Russia and China, and theories and experiences of post-socialism. His forthcoming book, Internationalist Aesthetics: Imagining China in Early Soviet Culture (Columbia University Press, 2021), rediscovers the intensive engagement with China in 1920s Soviet culture as a key experiment in the imagining of socialist internationalism. His current research project explores the geopoetics of the Russia-China border in the Russian and Chinese social imaginaries, from the late nineteenth century to the post-socialist period.
Roman Utkin specializes in twentieth-century Russian and Soviet poetry, prose, and visual culture. His current book project, Russian Berlin, examines the patterns of migration and cultural flows between Eastern and Central Europe and shows how refugees from Soviet Russia formed a unique diasporic community in Weimar Berlin.
Elena Zemskova