Rad Borislavov is an ACLS New Faculty Fellow in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University. His interests lie in the areas of avant-garde and modernist culture, Russian Formalism and the history of formalism in the arts, cinema and visual art, the history of the Cold War, and contemporary Russia. His book manuscript Viktor Shklovskii—Between Art and Life examines the life and work of the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovskii. Borislavov’s current research and teaching focus on twenty-first century Russian literature and culture, the intersection of literature and new media, and discourses of globalization.
Geoff Cebula is a PhD candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. His dissertation examines the authors involved with the OBERIU movement, placing their writings in the context of larger aesthetic debates in Soviet culture. He received his BA from Amherst College in 2008.
Bradley Gorski is a doctoral student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University. His interests in contemporary Russian literature include issues of authority and authorial control especially as related to images of violence and disgust.
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.
David Hock is A Ph.D. candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University, David Hock’s interests include Formalism, Symbolism, Futurism, and the evolution of Russian theory and poetics.
Katie Holt is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, Katharine Holt is currently adapting her dissertation, The Rise of Insider Iconography: Visions of Soviet Turkmenia in Russian-Language Literature and Film, 1921–1935, into the book manuscript Encountering the Desert: Orientalism, Socialist Realism, and Artistic Subjectivity in Soviet Central Asia, 1917–1935. She is also at work on a related research project about how Central Asian literature was translated into Russian and disseminated throughout the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s.
Pavel Khazanov is a 3rd year graduate 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.
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.
Dmitry Kuzmin graduated from Moscow State Pedagogical University (Philology Dept.). He has taught literature in colleges, and worked as assistant professor of foreign literatures and literary translation. In 1989 Kuzmin founded the Vavilon Union of Young Poets, which was the organizational hub for Moscow’s experimental poetry scene. Since 1993 he has been the head of ARGO-RISK Publishers (which publishes about twenty titles of current Russian poetry yearly). Since 1996 he has edited the Vavilon Internet project which includes an anthology of contemporary Russian writing (about 200 authors at present). Since 2006 he has also been editor in chief of Vozdukh [Air], a quarterly poetry magazine. Kuzmin has also run other periodicals including the first Russian magazine for gay writing Risk (1996–2002). He has won the Andrei Bely award of Merit in Literature (2002). Kuzmin’s poems have been published in translation in USA (A Public Space, St. Petersburg Review, Habitus, Aufgabe, Fulcrum), England, France, Poland, China, Italy, Estonia, and Slovenia. He has published in Russia translations of poetry from English (Auden, cummings, Stevens, Ashbery), French, and Ukrainian. Kuzmin’s selected poems and translations were published in 2008 in a 400-page hardcover edition, Horosho byt’ zhivym [It’s fine to be alive], and won the Moskovsky Schet [Moscow Count] award for the best debut poetry collection.
Daniil Leiderman is a PhD candidate, working on a dissertation entitled: Moscow Conceptualism and “Shimmering”: Authority, Anarchism, and Space. 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.
Maya Vinokur is a doctoral candidate in the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, “Power, Sexuality, and the Masochist Aesthetic from Sacher-Masoch to Kharms,” presents a pre-history of the 20th century’s two best-known totalitarianisms through a genealogy of the “masochist aesthetic” in German and Russian literature. Her translations of Daniil Kharms have appeared in Princeton University’s Inventory journal and she is a holder of Academia Rossica’s 2011 Young Translators Prize. She is also an editor at Digital Icons, an online journal focusing on Russian, Eurasian, and Central European new media.
Susanna Weygandt is a graduate student in the Slavic Department at Princeton University. She is writing her dissertation on the plays and performances of Novaia Drama. In and outside of her dissertation she documents contemporary performance theories in Russia – their historical origins, American and European counterpoints, and practical application–in the contexts of Anatoly Vasiliev’s verbal technique, Andrei Droznin’s movement plasticity, and Teatr.doc. Hands-on training and interviews with these theater artists have helped her grasp the crux of their performance methods. Lately, she has become interested in sonic imagery in poetry and performance. She received her BA from Bryn Mawr College, MA from Middlebury College’s Language School, and studied directing at GITIS in Moscow.