My research and teaching interests are in 20th and 21st century cultural studies of Russia and East and Central Europe, particularly the intersections of literary, visual, and performing arts with historical events and political ideas. My methods for a broad range of research projects include oral history, data collecting, archival research, and interpretation of texts and images. The main project I am working on is a book called Anarchist Currents in Russian Culture, which tells the stories of artistic, literary, and political anarchists in the Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and the Russian Federation. I am also leading a research project on the facts and myths surrounding Russians’ sabotage resistance to their government’s war on Ukraine. In scholarly publications, I have written about anarchist influences on Tolstoy and his famine aid initiatives; the memoirs of “Soviet anarchists;” and Russian performance art and documentary theater. This work appeared in The Slavic Review, The Russian Review, the Slavic and East European Journal, The LA Review of Books, and The New Yorker. What unites all of my projects are key questions about culture and history: How do art and literature shape political imaginaries? How do social movements influence cultural production? How does “high” culture interact with popular culture and subcultures?
These questions also influence my teaching on 20th and 21st century cultural studies of the region. For example, I have taught a course called Russia Through its Wars: Afghanistan to Ukraine, a course on theater and the performing arts in East and Central Europe, and a course on Russophone poetry. At the University of Michigan, where I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Michigan Society of Fellows, I taught courses in the Slavic Department on masculinities in Eastern Europe as well as a course on housing under state socialism and one on art and anarchism. Most of my courses feature guest speakers, visits to the archive, and options for creative work. I advise undergraduate theses in a broad range of topics.
I am committed to supporting joint faculty-student research and student activism and civic engagement. With colleagues in the Law School and the Pozen Center, I am co-leading a Neubauer Collegium-funded project about migrants’ human rights and experiences in Chicago. I find it especially rewarding to work with undergraduate student groups and support students in all their undertakings.
Prospective graduate students who are interested in interdisciplinary scholarship are invited to get in touch about their applications to the PhD program. I am available to advise dissertations on topics from 20th and 21st century cultural studies, and keen to support students studying literature and the arts in interdisciplinary or transnational ways. I currently advise on committees for the following dissertation projects: tuteishast’ (localness) in Belarusian culture; narcotic literature in Russia and Yugoslavia; Soviet Jewish underground culture; Shukshin’s prose and film; and gender epistemologies in Russian and US science fiction.