Biography
I am an Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Film and Media Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. I am a specialist in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian and East European literatures and cultures, with broad comparative interests. Within modernist and contemporary cultural studies, I focus on diasporic and transnational cultures; avant-gardes and politically engaged poetry; new media and cultural networks.
All of my projects share a fundamental commitment to the study of transnational cultural flow, though the topics range from Vladimir Nabokov’s English-language novels to Danube River and Black Sea studies, Russian political poetry, and international cultural and political networks. I study moments and movements that draw from local as well as global exchanges, and am particularly interested in canon formation, cultural capital and its geographical distributions—embodied in several different genres, media, and languages. I try to make as much of my work freely available online as possible.
My first monograph, Nabokov’s Canon: From Onegin to Ada, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2016 and selected for the Studies of the Harriman Institute series. My earlier work on Nabokov has led to two special journal issues (Ulbandus: Columbia University Slavic Review and the Nabokov Online Journal), and articles on topics ranging from remediation to translation theory. I recently co-edited a volume of unexpected approaches to Nabokov’s work with Brian Boyd, Nabokov Upside Down, also published by Northwestern University Press in 2017.
I am currently working on my second monograph, Avant-Garde Post – : Radical Poetics After the Soviet Union. I have published two articles corresponding to two chapters of the book—on the poets Kirill Medvedev and Roman Osminkin, in Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie 70.1 (2014) and the collected volume Cultural Forms of Political Protest in Russia (eds. Birgit Beumers, Alexander Etkind, Olga Gurova, and Sanna Turema, Routledge, 2017). The former has been reprinted for Stanford University’s digital salon ARCADE, and will be reprinted again in the volume The Idea of the Avant-Garde and What it Means Today (second edition, ed. Marc Léger, Black Dog Publishing and NeMe, forthcoming in 2018).
My research on the literatures and cultures of the former Yugoslavia, in turn, has led to the collected volume Watersheds: Poetics and Politics of the Danube River (Academic Studies Press, April 2016), and a number of articles on topics ranging from documentary film to nationalist rhetoric in online genres. One of these articles, on the interwar Zagreb-based avant-garde journal Zenit, originally published in the volume After Yugoslavia: Post-Yugoslav Cultural Spaces and Europe (ed. Radmila Gorup, Stanford University Press, 2013), has since been reprinted in the Belgrade-based journal Camenzind 14 / Kamenzind 4 (March 2014).
I am the co-editor of the academic journal Russian Literature; the co-curator of the “Poetry after Language colloquy for Stanford University’s ARCADE digital salon; and a contemporary film and literature reviewer for The Los Angeles Review of Books.