I am a scholar of modern Russophone literature and culture in the Russian Empire and the former Soviet Union, with additional specialties in film studies and gender theory. I joined the Slavic Department at the University of Chicago in Autumn 2021 from the Johns Hopkins University Department of Comparative Thought and Literature (formerly the Humanities Center). My research focuses on the relationship between art, ideology, and power, especially as it pertains to gender, and as inflected by the history of revolutionary thought in the Russian Empire and the aftermath of the establishment of the Soviet Union. I am above all interested in how works of art engage their audiences and the forms of community created by that engagement both as historical experience and theoretical aspiration. Through deeply historicized engagement with Russian and Soviet culture as well as careful attunement to the specificities of medium, my research shows the ways in which works of art, literature, and cinema serve to reinforce forms of commitment to authoritarian ideologies and imperial identities, but also have the potential to create alternate networks and unexpected solidarities.
My first book, Only Among Women: Philosophies of Community in the Russian Imagination, 1860-1940 (Northwestern UP, 2020), investigates the idea of an ideal community of women—a social sphere ostensibly free from the taint of money, sex or self-interest—that originates in the predominantly male imagination of the classic Russian novel between radicalism and conservatism, fuels mystical notions of unity in turn-of-the-century modernism, and finally becomes a commonplace in Stalinist culture and especially cinema. Framed in relationship to Russophone intellectual history as well as to Western philosophical imaginings and critiques of community from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Jean-Luc Nancy, Only Among Women offers a rethinking of the significance and surprising continuities of gender in both radical and conservative thought in Russophone culture. Only Among Women was selected among the first American books to be translated into Russian for the Gender Studies series at Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie (New Literary Review) Press, as «Только между женщинами»: Философия сообщества в русском и советском сознании, 1860–1940.
Current projects include a book titled The Special Effects of Soviet Wonder, on the ways in which Soviet sound cinema in its formative decade sought to immerse viewers in a utopian world of Soviet wonder filled with song, abundance, joy in labor, and vigilance against enemies. It’s also a book about immersivity in cinema as such, and the aims of movie magic. These aspirations for Soviet ideology to extend out of the film screen and expand the limits of cinema as a medium, I argue, both illuminate the workings of Soviet culture in its formative era, and also offer new resources to think critically about the relationship between cinema experience and the screen as its means of transmission, support, or constraint in our own age of expanded cinema and new media.
My ongoing interests include research on communities of artists outside the Soviet Union and Russian Federation inspired by the creative output of the Soviet avant-garde (including the project "The Echo of a Revolution: Voices of Protest in Iran" at the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona in May 2023), the divergent paths of feminist theory during the Cold War, and narrative and documentary cinema by women directors in Eastern Europe and Russia.
I teach courses at the undergraduate and graduate level on the Russian novel and Soviet culture, including seminars on gender, cinema, Slavic literary theory, and the environment in the Soviet literary imagination.