Tyler Adkins, PhD student (Anthropology), Princeton University, USA.
Marina Alexandrova currently teaches in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. With a background in comparative literature (Russian and Latin American), she focuses primarily on the revolutionary movements in the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Russia, the history of prisons in Russia, and food studies.
Marina Balina is Isaac Funk Professor and Professor of Russian Studies at Illinois Wesleyan University, USA. She is the author, editor and co-editor of numerous volumes, including most recently Russian Children’s Literature and Culture (with Larissa Rudova, 2008), Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style (with Evgeny Dobrenko, 2009,) The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Russian Literature (with Evgeny Dobrenko, 2011,) Constructing Childhood: Literature, History, Anthropology (2011, in Russian,) and To Kill Charskaia: Politics and Aesthetics in Soviet Children’s Literature of the 1920s and 1930s (2013, in Russian.) Her main area of investigation is children’s literature in Soviet Russia, its historical development, and its theoretical originality. In addition to her work in children’s literature, her scholarly interests include studies in the hybrid nature of life-writing in soviet and post-soviet Russia (autobiography, memoir, diary, and travelogue,) and she has published widely on this subject.
Massimo Balloni is a Ph.D. student in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. His current research focuses on collective authorship and on the connections between music (avtorskaia pesnia, rock, punk) and literary tradition.
Meghanne Barker is completing her doctorate in linguistic anthropology at The University of Michigan. Her dissertation is entitled Framing the Fantastic: Animating Childhood in Contemporary Kazakhstan. Barker conducted fieldwork in Kazakhstan at a state-run puppet theatre and a temporary, government-run home for preschool-aged children, observing, recording and analyzing children’s play, performance, and lessons alongside puppet artists’ rehearsals and performances. For her 24 months of fieldwork, Barker received generous funding from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, the Fulbright-IIE Program, and from the Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.
Molly Brunson is Associate Professor in the Departments of Slavic Languages and Literatures and History of Art at Yale University. She writes and teaches broadly on the literature and art of Russia’s long nineteenth century. Her first book, Russian Realisms: Literature and Painting, 1840–1890, was published in 2016 by Northern Illinois University Press. Brunson is currently working on a second book, The Russian Point of View: Perspective and the Birth of Modern Russian Culture, for which she was named a fellow at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in summer 2016.
Aleksandar Bošković is a Lecturer in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University, where he teaches courses on Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cinema and literature, as well as on the intersection of literature and visual culture in Slavic avant-gardes. He has published essays on issues of digital mnemonics, Yugonostalgia and cultural memory, avant-garde photobooks, Serbian poetry and post-Yugoslav fiction, history of European Küntstlerroman, and the theory of possible worlds. He is the author of The Poetic Humor in Vasko Popa’s Oeuvre (Institute for Literature and Art in Belgrade, 2008) and a co-editor (with Tatjana Aleksić) of Mediated Resistance: The Struggle of Independent Mediascapes During the Yugoslav Dissolution (Brill, 2017). He is currently working on several projects, including the anthology of Yugoslav modernism and the book manuscript, Slavic Avant-Garde Cinepoetry, a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exploration of photopoetry and bioscopic books within Slavic avant-gardes.
Siarhei Biareishyk is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Literature Department at New York University. His research is situated at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and political theory in the materialist tradition from Lucretius, Spinoza, and Marx to Lacan and Althusser. His dissertation Missed Encounters: Spinoza, Political Romanticism, Soviet Formalism considers theories of the encounter in the works of Novalis, Kleist, Tynyanov, and Shklovsky in conjunction with Spinozan thought. Through these theories of the encounter and their respective missed encounters the project unfolds a non-historicist and non-genetic literary history and a materialist theory of reading. Biareishyk has published on Hegel-Kojeve and Stalinism, psychoanalysis and the avant-garde, and Spinoza’s politics.
Robert Bird, Associate Professor (Slavic & Cinema), University of Chicago, USA.
Carlotta Chenoweth is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her dissertation, “The Illiterate Text: Literacy and Soviet Literature, 1918-1928,” considers how illiteracy serves as a generator of new textual forms in the early Soviet period.
Kirill Chunikhin graduated with a degree in English Philology from Kemerovo State University in 2009. He received his M.A. in Art History from the European University at St. Petersburg in 2012. Kirill defended his Ph.D. at Jacobs University Bremen in 2016. His research project explored the representation of American visual art in the USSR during the Cold War. Currently, Kirill is a Pontica Magna Fellow at the New Europe College in Bucharest.
Marlow Davis, PhD student (Slavic/CompLit) Columbia University, USA.
Irina Denischenko, PhD Candidate (Slavic) Columbia University, USA.
Polina Dimova is an affiliated scholar of Russian and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. Her book manuscript, The Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism, investigates the flourishing exchanges among the arts at the fin de siècle through the lens of synaesthesia: the figurative or physiological crossing of the senses, for instance, in the perception sound as color. Her second book project explores the appropriations of Alexander Scriabin’s music and ideas in twentieth-century Russian literature and culture. Dimova has published articles on Russian Symbolism and electric light, Sergei Prokofiev’s children’s music, Prokofiev’s Scythianism, Alexander Scriabin, Evgenii Zamiatin, Andrei Bely and Wassily Kandinsky, Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss, and R.M. Rilke. At Oberlin College, she taught courses on Russian literature, music, and art since the nineteenth century (in both English and Russian), as well as on European Modernism across the arts, visual theory, and translation studies.
Gabriella A. Ferrari, is a third year Ph.D. student in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She holds a B.A. in Classics and Slavic Studies from Brown University and has previously worked as a Russian art cataloguer and researcher in London. Her research interests focus on the intersection of image and text in Soviet culture. Her work has recently focused on Soviet propaganda books from the 1920s and 30s, Soviet cinema, and Moscow Conceptualism.
Elena Fratto (Princeton University)
Philip Gleissner is a PhD student in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. He has earned a Magister Artium (BA/MAequivalent) Slavic Studies, Political Science and Economics from Kiel University, Germany and was a visiting graduate Student at Penn State before joining Princeton in 2012. His main interests are Russian, Czech and German 20th century cultures and literatures, critical theory, sociology of literature and periodical studies.
Alexey Golubev is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the History Department of the University of Toronto. He will join the History Department of the University of Houston as an Assistant Professor in Russian history and digital humanities in fall 2017.
Bradley Gorski is a Ph.D. Candidate in Slavic Literature at Columbia University where his research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian literature and literary culture. His dissertation, “Authors of Success: Cultural Capitalism and Literary Evolution in Contemporary Russia,” examines various technologies of literary prominence in post-Soviet Russia—from mass literature to social media—and their attendant effects on the development of contemporary literature. He is currently Digital Humanities Project Manager for the Black Sea Networks Initiative at Columbia University and Editor of Ulbandus 17, “A Culture of Institutions.”
Helena Goscilo received her early education at a snotty British grammar school in Rugby, her BA from Queens College, NY, and her graduate degrees from Indiana University, Bloomington. Currently Professor of Slavic at The Ohio State University, affiliated with Comparative Studies, Film Studies, the program in Popular Culture, and the Departments of Folklore and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, she is a self-confessed grafoman and intellectual slut. She has translated many literary texts and written on every period of Russian culture from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century on topics in art, celebrity studies, film, gender, graphics, literature, music, politics, and whatever else may be subsumed by the rubric of Cultural Studies. Though Russian and Soviet culture is her primary specialization, she also works on things Polish, particularly film. Visual genres are her current mania. Of her twenty-odd book-length publications, those in the last six years include Cinepaternity: Fathers and Sons in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film (co-ed., 2010), Reflections and Refractions: The Mirror in Russian Culture (Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, ed., 2010/2011), Celebrity and Glamour in Contemporary Russia: Shocking Chic (co-ed., 2011), Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon (ed., 2012), Embracing Arms: Cultural Representations of Slavic and Balkan Women in War (co-ed., 2012), Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales (co-ed., 2013), Fade from Red: The Cold War Ex-Enemy in Russian and American Film 1990-2005 (co-written, 2014), and Russian Aviation, Space Flight, and Visual Culture (co-ed., 2016). Among her current projects are a monograph titled Graphic Ideology: The Soviet Poster from Stalin to Yeltsin, and Beauty without Taboo: The New Academy of Fine Arts (Saint Petersburg, 1980s-2000s) (with Maria Engström and Vlad Strukov).
Thomas F. Keenan is the Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies Librarian at Princeton University. He comes from an academic background in Russian and Italian literature, holding an MA in each from the University of Toronto and Middlebury College respectively. Currently, Thomas is a PhD candidate in Yale University’s Department of Slavic Languages in Literatures and is completing a dissertation on Mikhail Bulgakov and Dante Alighieri.
Natalia Klimova comes to Princeton from St. Petersburg State University, Russia, where she received a graduate degree in English and Literature. She then received her M.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities and Social Thought from New York University. Natalia also has a strong interest in and an affinity for film, theater, and performance studies, which dates back to 2000-2002 when she took classes at the Academy of Theater in St. Petersburg, studying theory and history of theater in Russia and abroad. Her current research is focused on documentary modes in contemporary Russian culture, including literature, theater, and film.
Christina Kiaer, Associate Professor (Art History), Northwestern University, USA.
Pavel Khazanov is a PhD student in the Comparative Literature program at UPenn. Having previously completed a BA in English at UCLA and an MA in Philosophy at the Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy (now at Kingston University, London), his interests include 20th-21st century literature, political theology and Jewish studies. His current project, still at an exploratory stage, focuses on tracking the origins and the consequences of the return of Russian Imperial aesthetics to Russia’s physical and discursive space in the wake of the perestroika.
Abigail Kret received her BA in History from American University and her MA in Russian Studies from Columbia University. She is currently a doctoral candidate in History at Princeton University. Her research is concerned with the intersection of economic development and globalization across the three worlds of the Cold War in the 1970s.
Michael Kunichika currently teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard. He will join the faculty of Amherst College in the Fall of 2017. His first book, “Our Native Antiquity”: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Culture of Russian Modernism (2015), examined the construction of an indigenous antiquity by Russian poets, writers, and filmmakers. Kunichika is currently working on two books: the first, Specters of Empire, a study of the representation of race in early Soviet cinema; the second, Archaeology in the Twilight of Utopia, is a cultural history of prehistoric archaeology in late Socialist culture. His research has been supported by the Davis Center at Harvard and the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ).
Daniil M. Leiderman currently teaches Art History at the Department of Visualization at Texas A&M university. In 2016, Daniil defended a PhD dissertation entitled: Moscow Conceptualism and “Shimmering”: Authority, Anarchism, and Space at the Department of Art & Archaeology in Princeton University. The project investigates the circle of experimental artists and writers that emerged in Moscow’s unofficial artistic scene in the early 1970s in the context of nonconformism, tracing their development of the critical metaposition called “shimmering” and its relationship to artistic resistance. In 2012, Daniil conducted and recorded a series of interviews with artists who participated in Moscow Conceptualism, he is in the process of translating and transcribing these conversations. In 2011, Daniil helped research and write for the Brooklyn Museum exhibition Russian Modern. Daniil received his B.A. from New York University in 2008.
Yuri Leving is Professor of Russian Literature and Film in the Department of Russian Studies, Dalhousie University, Canada. In 2013-2014, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Fellow at Heidelberg University, Germany, and a Visiting Professor at the American Academy in Rome (2015). Leving is the author of four monographs: Marketing Literature and Posthumous Legacies: The Symbolic Capital of Leonid Andreev and Vladimir Nabokov (co-authored with Frederick H. White; New York, 2013); Keys to The Gift. A Guide to V. Nabokov’s Novel (Boston, 2011); Upbringing by Optics: Book Illustration, Animation, and Text (Moscow, 2010); Train Station – Garage – Hangar. Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Russian Urbanism (St. Petersburg, 2004; Short-listed for Andrey Bely Prize), and has also edited and co-edited six volumes of articles, most recently: Shades of Laura. Vladimir Nabokov’s Last Novel The Original of Laura (Montreal, 2013); Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl – Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design (New York, 2013; reviews in The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Huffington Post), and Anatomy of a Short Story (New York, 2012, with an afterword by John Banville). Leving has published over a hundred scholarly articles on various aspects of Russian and comparative literature. He served as a commentator on the first authorized Russian edition of The Collected Works of Vladimir Nabokov in five volumes (1999-2001), and was the curator for the exhibition “Nabokov’s Lolita: 1955-2005” in Washington, D.C., which celebrated the 50th anniversary of the publication of Lolita. Leving is the founding editor of the Nabokov Online Journal (since 2007). He is currently finishing a book “The Artist Joseph Brodsky”.
Maria Litovskaia, Professor (Russian Lit), Ural State University, Russia.
Zdenko Mandušić is a recent joint-Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures and Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago. His areas of study are poetics of cinema, history of film style, theories of affect, and realism. His present research investigates how Soviet films communicated their narratives to spectators through cinematographic techniques, how formal elements organized viewer perception of these films, and how these formal elements were conceptualized in public discourse.
Stephen Norris is Professor of History and Interim Director of the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University (OH). He is the author of two books on Russian cultural history: A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812-1945 (2006) and Blockbuster History in the New Russia: Movies, Memory, Patriotism (2012). He has co-edited three books: Preserving Petersburg: History, Memory, Nostalgia (2008, with Helena Goscilo); Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema (2008, with Zara Torlone); and Russia’s People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present (2012, with Willard Sunderland). His edited book, Museums of Communism: New Memory Sites in Central and Eastern Europe, will appear with Indiana University Press. His long-term research project is on the Soviet political caricaturist, Boris Efimov (1900-2008) and is entitled Communism’s Cartoonist: Boris Efimov in the Soviet Century.
Ksenia Nouril is a PhD candidate in her fourth year of the Art History program at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She is writing her dissertation under the advisement of Dr. Jane A. Sharp on contemporary Eastern European artists who actively question and engage with history and historical representations of socialism since 1989. Ksenia holds a Dodge Fellowship, working as a Graduate Curatorial Assistant in the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers. She has assisted in the organization of numerous exhibitions, including Leonid Sokov: Ironic Objects, Putting a Face to the Name: Artist Portraits from the Dodge Collection, as well as a rehang of the permanent collection. Currently, she is organizing the exhibition Dreamworlds and Catastrophes: Intersections of Art and Technology in the Dodge Collection, which will open in April 2016. When not dissertating, Ksenia works with the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) initiative at the Museum of Modern Art, where she researches and plans programming related to Central and Eastern European art, specifically Russia. Previously, she was the Research and Editorial Assistant for the Thomas Walther Collection in the Department of Photography at MoMA, where she co-organized the exhibition Production-Reproduction: The Circulation of Photographic Modernism, 1900-1950.
Serguei Oushakine is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. His research is concerned with transitional processes and situations: from the formation of newly independent national cultures after the collapse of the Soviet Union to post-traumatic identities and hybrid cultural forms. His first book The Patriotism of Despair: Loss, Nation, and War in Russia focused on communities of loss and exchanges of sacrifices in provincial post-communist Russia. His current project explores Eurasian postcoloniality as a means of affective reformatting of the past and as a form of retroactive victimhood. Oushakine’s Russian-language publications include edited volumes on trauma, family, gender and masculinity.
Cécile Pichon-Bonin is researcher at the Fench National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS-Centre Georges Chevrier) and associate researcher at the CERCEC (Centre d’étude des mondes russe, caucasien et centre européen, CNRS-EHESS, Paris). She teaches courses on art and power in Europe during the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries at Sciences po-Paris. As art historian and curator, she is the author and co-editor of several publications on Soviet painting of the 1920’s and the 1930’s, including Peinture et politique en URSS, L’itinéraire des membres de la Société des artistes de chevalet (OST), 1917-1941 (Dijon, Presses du réel, 2013). She is currently working on children’s visual culture in Russia and USSR from the end of the 19th century to 1945.
Silja Pitkänen is a PhD Candidate at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research interests include propaganda art, cultural history of the so-called totalitarian states, the history of childhood, and, besides, the utilization of images – especially photographs – as historical source. In addition, Silja is secretary of the Finnish Labor History society. Alongside working with her dissertation, she has published non-fiction books on Finnish-Americans and a youth fiction book which examines the power of images. Currently, Silja is a visiting Fulbright Student Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.
Nariman Skakov, Assistant Professor (Slavic), Stanford, USA.
Marina Sokolovskaya, Assistant Professor (Art History), Ural Federal University; Chief Librarian, Sverdlovsk Region’s Library named after V. G. Belinsky, Yekaterinburg, Russia.
Maria Starkova-Vindman is an independent scholar, currently working on a book project on the representation of Soviet childhood. In addition to Russian and Soviet art and culture, her academic interests include visual culture in shaping national identities, art markets and cultural economics. She has received a PhD in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London with the dissertation focusing on the image of the New Soviet Child as a pioneer citizen of the USSR. Before specialising on Soviet culture, she received her MA as a Kilfinan Scholar from the Courtauld and an MA and a PhD from Moscow State University in Italian Renaissance art history (exploring the relationship between patronage and “style” in the quattrocento art of the Marches region). She has previously assisted teaching the Courtauld MA course on contemporary art and worked at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow as an assistant keeper and curator.
Kevin Platt is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Graduate Chair of the Comparative Literature Program at University of Pennsylvania. He works on representations of Russian history, Russian historiography, history and memory in Russia, Russian lyric poetry, and global post-Soviet Russian culture. Platt received his B.A. from Amherst College and his Ph.D. from Stanford University and taught at Pomona College before joining the Penn faculty in 2002. He is the author of Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths (Cornell UP, 2011) and History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution (Stanford, 1997; Russian edition 2006), and the co-editor (with David Brandenberger) of Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Wisconsin UP, 2006). He also edited and contributed translations to Modernist Archaist: Selected Poems by Osip Mandelstam (Whale and Star, 2008) and edited Intimations: Selected Poetry by Anna Akhmatova, translated by James Falen (Whale and Star, 2010). His current projects include a critical historiography of Russia, a study of contemporary Russian culture in Latvia and a number of translation projects.
Birgitte Beck Pristed is assistant professor at Russian studies at Aarhus University in Denmark. Her Ph.D. studies at the University of Mainz in Germany resulted in a dissertation on contemporary Russian book design and changing values in visual representation of literature from perestroika to present. She has previously worked for a shorter period as a Danish teacher at the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow and as a museum curator in the Workers’ Assembly Hall in Copenhagen, where Lenin and Rosa Luxembourg met in 1910. She received her MA in comparative literature, modern cultural studies, and Russian from the University of Copenhagen.
Katherine M.H. Reischl is Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2013. Her research focuses primarily on twentieth-century Russian literature, art, and culture, with particular attention paid to the relationship between text and image. Her first book project, Photographic Literacy, Photography and Writing in Russia, explores the intersection of photography and writing in the texts of author-photographers including Lev Tolstoy, Leonid Andreev, Maksimilian Voloshin, Mikhail Prishvin, Sergei Tret’iakov, Il’ia Ehrenburg, Il’ia Il’f, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Vladimir Nabokov. As one of the co-organizers of the Pedagogy of Images project, she is also working on the digital humanities interface and a print catalog for the collection. Her second book project grows directly from her ongoing work on Soviet children’s books. It will focus on the life of images in translation in the twentieth century, tracing pictures across national borders from children’s books to periodicals, and from the gallery wall to the digital database.
Larissa Rudova is Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor in Modern Languages and Professor of Russian at Pomona College, Claremont, California. She is a co-editor of Russian Children’s Literature and Culture (2008, 2011), with Marina Balina, and the author of two monographs on Boris Pasternak (1994, 1997). Her research interests and numerous publications focus on modern Russian literature and culture, cinema, gender studies, Soviet and post-Soviet children’s and YA literature and film. Her current research project is on Russian and East European war childhood. Rudova co-founded ChEEER (Childhood in Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and Russia working group), a research working group affiliated with ASEEES.
Laura Todd currently teaches in the Department of History at De Montfort University, United Kingdom. In 2016, Laura was awarded a PhD from the University of Nottingham for her thesis: Youth Film in Russia and Serbia Since the 1990s. Her research interests and current projects span various areas in the history of childhood and youth in East and South-East Europe, as well as the representations of children and young people in media. While pursuing these interests in Soviet children’s books, she is currently revising her thesis for publication, and working on research projects concerning the history and representation of children during the Bosnian War of 1992-95. Laura has previously worked on projects connecting visual culture and propaganda in the Soviet Union: the first was the online exhibition, ‘Windows on War’, an initiative of the University of Nottingham; and the second was during an internship at the British Library in London, curating the Library’s collection of Russian and Soviet political ephemera from the 1960s, 80s and 90s.
Maya Vinokour is a doctoral candidate in the Program for Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, “Power, Sexuality, and the Masochistic Aesthetic from Sacher-Masoch to Kharms,” argues that the “masochistic aesthetic,” which originated in late 19th-century Austria-Hungary, both reflected and shaped the incursion of politics into private life that characterized Stalinism and, later, Nazism. Her article “Books of Laughter and Forgetting: Satire and Trauma in the Novels of Il’f and Petrov” will appear in Slavic Review in Summer 2015.
Emily Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. Most of her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian poetry, with a particular focus on literary groups and their intersections with society at large, and her dissertation focuses on Decembrist poetry as an expression of a particular emotional community.
Sara Pankenier Weld is an Assistant Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is the author of Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde, which was published in 2014 by Northwestern University Press and received the International Research Society for Children’s Literature Book Award in 2015. She also published a chapter in the 2015 volume Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde edited by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. She is currently revising a book entitled Rare Books by Remarkable Russians: Toward a Radical Recontexualization of Early Soviet Picturebooks, which mounts a close analysis of image and text in little-known picturebooks by prominent Russian figures. Other publications include articles and chapters on works by Vladimir Lebedev, Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitsky, Mikhail Tsekhanovsky, Sergei Eisenstein, Vladimir Nabokov, Osip Mandelstam, Daniil Kharms, Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Maxim Gorky in Slavic Review, Slavic and East European Journal, and Russian Language Journal, as well as in other journals and books published in the US and abroad. In general, her research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian literature, comparative literature, and Scandinavian literature; avant-garde literature, art, and theory; literatures of the north; word and image; childhood, children’s literature, and picturebooks. Sara is an executive officer of Childhood in Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and Russia (ChEEER), a working group within ASEEES.
Susanna Weygandt received her BA from Bryn Mawr College, MA from Middlebury College, and studied theater directing at the Russian Academy of Theater Arts (G.I.T.I.S.) in Moscow. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate in the Slavic Department at Princeton University. Her dissertation entitled, “Embodiment in Post-Somatic, Postdramatic Russian New Drama” will be workshopped at the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research Fellowship at Harvard University this summer. She has ventured into post-Soviet theater and drama, thanks to support from Fulbright, to document a consensus about Anatoly Vasiliev’s voice technique (an article appearing in Brown Slavic Contributions, Vol. XIV, 2013). Her article on movement theater, “The Andrei Droznin Method of Plastika Training” appears in the Russian journal Theater. Visual Art. Film. Music. (1, 2011). Her article “‘Dramatic Action’ in the plays of Ivan Vyrypaev: A Shift from the Physical to the Verbal Plane,” appears in the Russian volume “New Drama of the 21st Century” (Samara State University, 2014). Although her primary area of research is theater, she has a certificate in Princeton University’s History of Science Program, for which she has pursued research on youth psychological development and shaping (plasticity) in the context of Soviet behaviorism and the theories of Aron Zalkind.
Erika Wolf, Associate Professor (Art History), University of Otago, New Zealand.