Tarik Cyril Amar (Department of History and the Harriman Institute, Columbia University) works on the history of Russia, Ukraine, and the Soviet Union and postwar politics and culture in a transnational perspective including Poland, Eastern Germany and societies on its western side. He has recently published “The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv” (Cornell University Press), explaining the local and transnational forces behind the twentieth-century transformation of one of Europe’s most important multi-ethnic borderland cities into a postwar Soviet and Ukrainian urban center. He served for three years as the Academic Director of the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv, Ukraine; he occasionally comments on the Russia-EU-Ukraine crisis. In his current project “Invisible Bonds” he addresses popular stories of heroic espionage in the Cold War Soviet Union and its eastern European client states and beyond.
Malika Bahovadinova is a PhD candidate in Socio-cultural Anthropology in the Anthropology Department at Indiana University – Bloomington. Her research interests include the anthropology of state and bureaucracy, migration, political anthropology, socialism, labour history, and Central Asia. Her dissertation research focuses on migration management and policies regulating labour migration through an analysis of their bureaucratic practice in Tajikistan and Russia. During her PhD research, she conducted seventeen months of fieldwork in Tajikistan and Russia to study the application of local and international agendas in the field of labour migration. Her article “Tajikistan’s Bureaucratic Management of Exclusion: Responses to the Russian Reentry Ban Database” has recently been published in Central Asian Affairs (2016).
Margaret Beissinger is a Research Scholar in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. Her research and writing focuses on Balkan cultures and oral traditions, oral epic, and Romani traditional culture and music-making. She is the author of The Art of the Lăutar: The Epic Tradition of Romania and coeditor of Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community as well as Manele in Romania: Cultural Expression and Social Meaning in Balkan Popular Music, published this year; she has also written numerous articles.
Edyta Bojanowska is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Russian and East European Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University. She works on the treatments of empire and nationalism in nineteenth-century Russian culture, being increasingly drawn to projects that combine literature and history. She is currently completing a book project by the still tentative title The Colonial World through Russian Eyes, forthcoming from Harvard Univ. Press in 2017, which uses Ivan Goncharov’s travelogue about Africa and Asia, The Frigate Pallada (1858), as a lens onto global colonial history. Her other ongoing book project is Empire and the Russian Classics (under contract with Harvard Univ. Press), which explores imperial themes in the work of all major nineteenth-century writers. She published Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism (Harvard Univ. Press, 2007), which won the MLA Award for the best book in Slavic Studies, and which was translated into Ukrainian in 2013. She also published articles about Dostoevsky’s and Chekhov’s engagements with Russian imperial expansion and colonial management.
Johanna Bockman is Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Affairs at George Mason University. She is the author of Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism (Stanford, 2011). She is currently writing a book on public housing in Washington, DC, tentatively titled Just One Block: Race, Radical Politics, and Revanchism in Washington, DC. Next year, Bockman will return to her project on the 1980s debt crisis from the perspectives of the second and third worlds. Her article “Socialist Globalization against Capitalist Neocolonialism: The Economic Ideas behind the New International Economic Order” published in the journal Humanity (Spring 2015) is part of this project. She is currently the president of the DC Sociological Society.
Lilia Boliachevets works as research assistant at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Saint Petersburg, and studies history there. Her research interests include political emigration from Russia and the Soviet Union, and relations between the Soviet Union and post-colonial states. She co-authored several papers on the economic cooperation between the USSR and Latin American countries.
Yuri Boyanin is a Bulgarian PhD student of history at La Trobe University, Australia. His field of research is the 1930s Kyrgyzstan. Yuri is writing a thesis about Naryn, a region tucked deep in the Tian Shan mountains of central Kyrgyzstan. Initially, he was interested in the region’s historiography: the trends and myths about collectivisation in Central Asia. Eventually, his work turned into a quest to survey the region’s lush pastures and high plateaus; its many abandoned towns and ghost roads. This turned more into ethnography, photography and sound. His work is now meant to give a different perspective and idea of Kyrgyz history and ‘space’. To engage the senses: not just study the place and its history, but smell it, hear it, touch it, see it. Feel the spirits of the past and present, of the future, of nature, mountain and humanity. His work has been funded by generous grants from the Royal Geographical Society, the Australian Commonwealth, and the Explorers Club, New York. Aged 27, he has travelled to 109 countries, including all former Soviet republics.
Choi Chatterjee is Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles. She is the author of Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910–1939 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), and co-author of The 20th Century: A Retrospective (Westview Press, 2002). She is the co-editor of Americans Experience Russia: Encountering the Enigma, 1917 to the Present (Routledge, 2013), and of Everyday Life in Russia: Past and Present (Indiana University Press, 2015). Her co-authored textbook, Russia’s Long Twentieth Century: Voices, Memories, Contested Perspectives, will be published by Routledge in May 2016. Chatterjee is currently working on a monograph titled, Disruptive Transnationalism, or What Happens When Russia Enters World History. She recently published a chapter from this book, “Imperial Incarcerations: Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaia, Vinayak Savarkar and the Original Sins of Modernity,” in the journal, Slavic Review (Winter, 2015).
Rossen Djagalov is Assistant Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. His interests lie in socialist culture globally and, more specifically, in the linkages between cultural producers and audiences in the USSR and abroad. His manuscript, “Premature Postcolonialists: Soviet-Third-World Literary and Cinematic Encounters in the Age of Three Worlds,” reconstructs the history of the main organizations within which those encounters took place – the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association (founded in Tashkent in 1958) and the biannual Tashkent Festival of African, Asian and Latin American Film (1968-1990) – and their consequences for Soviet and Third-World literature and film. His second book project, “The People’s Republic of Letters: Towards a Media History of Twentieth-Century Socialist Internationalism,” examines the relationship between the political left and the different media that at different times played a major role in connecting its publics globally (the proletarian novel of the first half of the 20th century, the singer-songwriter performance of the 1960s, and contemporary documentary film). He is a member of the LeftEast editorial collective. Prior to coming to NYU in 2015, Rossen was a lecturer in Harvard’s History and Literature Program, a Penn Humanities Forum postdoctoral fellow and an Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at Koç University, Istanbul.
Albert Doja is a University full Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Lille, France, and an Ordinary full Member of the National Academy of Sciences, Albania, holding the first Chair of anthropology. A former Honorary Fellow of the Department of Anthropology at University College London and on secondment (temporary assignment) to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) as the founding Vice-Chancellor of the new University of Durres in Albania, he has held several academic positions in France, Britain, Ireland and Albania, lectured social anthropology and conducted extensive fieldwork research in many other countries. He is on the editorial board of international academic journals and he has so far published a couple of books and many original articles in international peer-reviewed and indexed journals. Special interests include politics of knowledge, power and ideology; political anthropology of symbolism and religion, intercultural communication; political technologies of the self, personhood, gender construction, kinship, and reproduction activism; anthropology of politics and history; political-anthropological theory, structural analysis, post-structuralism and neo-structuralism.
Elena Fratto holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, in addition to a Master’s in History of Science from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Milan. Her research interests lie at the intersection between literary theory and epistemology in 19th- and 20th-century Russia, Italy and France. She has investigated the literary implications of non-Euclidean geometries, late 19th-century astronomy, entomology, and medicine. She has also worked on Boris Eikhenbaum, the fictional writings of the Russian Formalists, and the Kitsch and Camp aesthetics in post-Soviet Russia. Her dissertation, “Medicine as Storytelling: Emplotment Strategies in the Definition of Illness and Healing (1880-1930),” analyzes the narrative structure of medical knowledge, in both its formulation and transmission, from the fin de siècle to the early 1930s in Russia and beyond. This upcoming fall Elena will join the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton as an assistant professor.
Zsuzsa Gille is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is author of From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary (Indiana University Press 2007—recipient of honorable mention of the AAASS Davis Prize), co-editor of Post-Communist Nostalgia with Maria Todorova (Berghahn Press 2010), and co-author of Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (University of California Press, 2000). She was the special guest editor of Slavic Review’s thematic cluster on Nature, Culture, Power (2009). She has published on issues of qualitative methodology as it relates to globalization and new concepts of space, on environmental politics and on the sociology of food. (Her recent articles include “The Hungarian Foie Gras Boycott: Struggles For Moral Sovereignty In Postsocialist Europe” forthcoming in Eastern European Politics and Societies; “Reassembling the Macrosocial: Modes of Production, Actor Networks and Waste Regimes” published in Environment and Planning A; and “Is there a global postsocialist condition?” published in Global Society.) Her most recent book is Paprika, Foie Gras, and Red Mud: The Politics of Materiality in the European Union (2016 Indiana University Press) investigates the relationship between power and materiality in a transnational context.
Saygun Gökarıksel is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. His research interests include the legal and political anthropology of the state, violence, and citizenship in the context of transitional justice and neoliberal democratization. He completed his Ph.D. in Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His dissertation focused on reckoning with the communist past in Poland especially, lustration, with a focus on the issues of state and class formation, rightwing populism, and neoliberal globalization. His ethnographic work concerned the legal trials of the people accused of “collaboration” with the communist-era secret service. Drawing on his archival research in Poland and Germany, he also works on a project concerning the life stories of communists/socialists from Turkey who had lived in exile in the former East bloc during the Cold War. He was a research fellow at the New Europe College, Bucharest, and completed his M.A. at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow. He had been a co-editor of an on-line forum on social movements at the Council for European Studies, Columbia University. His writings and political commentaries appeared in journals and forums across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the U.S.
Artemy Kalinovsky is Assistant Professor (Universitair Docent) of East European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He teaches BA and MA level courses on Russian, Central Asian, and Cold War history. Artemy has a PhD and an MA from the LSE in International History and a BA from the George Washington University. He is the author of A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011), and co-editor with Sergey Radchenko, of The End of the Cold War and the Third World (Routledge: 2011), as well as the Routledge Handbook of Cold War Studies with Craig Daigle (2014). More recently, he co-edited Reassessing Orientalism: Interlocking Orientologies in the Cold War Era (2015) and is a co-author of the forthcoming Missionaries of Modernity: Advisory Missions and the Struggle for Hegemony in Afghanistan and Beyond. His current research is focused on the politics and practices of development in Soviet Central Asia. A Veni grant from the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) has made it possible for him to spend extended periods of time traveling and living in the region and in Russia, conducting archival research and oral histories. Articles based on this research have appeared or will appear in Ab Imperio (2013), Asiatische Studien (2015), Kritika (2016), and Cahiers du Monde Russe (2016).
Diana T. Kudaibergenova is a political and cultural sociologist. In her two current book projects she focuses on nationalistic discourses and power elites in the Soviet and post-Soviet contexts. Her first book project analyses the ways in which cultural elites re-wrote historical narratives of the Kazakh nation in the twentieth century. The second project deals with contemporary political forces, geopolitics, and power of nationalism in Latvia and Kazakhstan. Diana received her PhD from the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge in 2015 where she studied power relations and nationalistic movements in the Baltic states and Central Asia prior and after their independence. She has published articles on gender and contemporary art in Central Asia; ideology and nationalism in Kazakhstan, and elitist regimes in Latvia and Kazakhstan. Her forthcoming articles explore discourses of revolt and national re-imagination in the 1980s and 1990s art, and the postcolonial literature of Mukhtar Magauin.
Michael Kunichika is currently a William F. Doney Member in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is currently working on two book length studies: the first considers the interrelations of anti-imperialism and ethnicity in silent Soviet cinema and the second examines archaeology and cultural production in the 1960s and ‘70s in the Soviet Union. He is the author of “Our Native Antiquity”: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Culture of Russian Modernism (Beacon, 2015).
Emily Laskin is a graduate student in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. She works on Russian Turkestan and Soviet Central Asia, postcolonial theory, and ecocriticism and environmental writing in Russian and Soviet literature. Her dissertation focuses on travel narratives, both fictional and factual, in Central Asia from around 1880 to 1930. She works in Russian, English, and Persian. Laskin received a B.A. from Barnard College and an M.A. in Russian Regional Studies from Columbia University before pursuing a PhD at Berkeley. She’s also a freelance writer, translator, and food columnist for Berkeley’s own independent news source, berkeleyside.com.
Viacheslav Morozov is Professor of EU-Russia Studies at the University of Tartu and Chairman of the Council of the UT Centre for EU-Russia Studies. He works on the issues of Russian national identity and foreign policy. His book Russia and the Others: Identity and Boundaries of a Political Community (Moscow: NLO Books, 2009) introduces neo-Gramscian theory of hegemony to Russian identity studies. His more recent research aims to reveal how Russia’s political and social development has been conditioned by the country’s position in the international system. This approach has been laid out in his most recent monograph Russia’s Postcolonial Identity: A Subaltern Empire in a Eurocentric World (Palgrave, 2015), while the comparative dimension is explored, inter alia, in the edited volume Decentring the West: The Idea of Democracy and the Struggle for Hegemony (Ashgate, 2013) and in the article ‘Indigeneity and subaltern subjectivity in decolonial discourses: a comparative study of Bolivia and Russia’ (co-authored with Elena Pavlova, forthcoming in Journal of International Relations and Development). Professor Morozov is a member of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia), based at George Washington University. In 2007–2010, he was a member of the Executive Council of the Central and East European International Studies Association (CEEISA).
David Chioni Moore is Associate Professor of International Studies, English, and African Studies at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His work focuses on long-distance connections and Afro-planetary networks among and beyond 20th and 21st century African and Afro-diasporic writers. A significant comparatist interest connects postcolonial with Soviet and post-Soviet dynamics. He has published on the African American poet Langston Hughes’s Soviet Central Asian writings; Hughes’s South African connections; the postcolonial as the post-Soviet; the worldwide translations of the Cameroonian novelist Ferdinand Oyono; the word “Africa” in African philosophy; and other subjects in PMLA, Diaspora, Transition, Research in African Literatures, Callaloo, Genre, the Journal of Anthropological Research, Profession, the Slavic and East European Journal, Resources for American Literary Study, and other venues. He is co-editor with Martin Bernal of Black Athena Writes Back (Duke UP 2001). Works in progress include a fourteen-language digital presentation of all the translations of Ferdinand Oyono’s 1956 Une Vie de Boy; an edition of Langston Hughes’s Soviet Central Asia writings; and essays on cosmopolitanism, Nigerian email spam, the reception history of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Langston Hughes’s oblique encounter with the Ukrainian holodomor.
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. As an editor or co-editor, he prepared thematic clusters and special issues of journals on totalitarian laughter, jokes of repression and jocularity, materiality and affect, contemporary nomadism, and post-soviet urbanism. Oushakine’s Russian-language publications include edited and co-edited volumes on trauma, family, gender, and masculinity. Oushakine has been the Chair of the organizing committee of Princeton Conjunction since its first meeting in 2008.
Kevin M.F. Platt is professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and chair of the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. He works on history and memory in Russia, Russian lyric poetry, and global post-Soviet Russian culture. 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 UP, 1997; Russian edition 2006), and the coeditor (with David Brandenberger) of Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Wisconsin UP, 2006). He is also active in translation of Russian poetry, and has recently published a collection of Russophone Latvian poets in English translation Hit Parade: The Orbita Group (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016). Current projects include a book on the history and memory of Stalinist violence and a study of contemporary Russian culture in Latvia.
Ekaterina Pravilova (Princeton University, USA)
Arvind Rajagopal is a Professor of Media Studies at NYU, and an affiliate faculty in the Depts of Sociology and Social and Cultural Analysis. His scholarly work is at the intersection of sociology, cultural history and media theory, and explores the history of publicity vis-a-vis postcolonial state formation. His book Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge, 2001) won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize from the Association of Asian Studies in 2003. His edited volumes include The Indian Public Sphere (Oxford 2009), and Media and Utopia (the latter with Anupama Rao), Routledge 2016. Recent articles include “The Emergency and the New Indian Middle Class” in Modern Asian Studies, and “Special Political Zone” on the anti-Muslim violence in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, in South Asian History and Culture, “Putting America in its Place” in Public Culture, and “Indian Politics Under Modi” in Social Text’s Periscope. He has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Goettingen (Germany), the Delhi School of Economics (University of Delhi), and the Central University of Hyderabad. His current research draws on archives in India, the UK, Germany, France and the United States, and locates India’s post colonial state form in the context of Cold War history, and the mediatic afterlives of state socialism.
Harsha Ram is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. His interests include Russian-Eurasian imperial history, comparative literary romanticisms and modernisms, the Russian and European avant-garde, the cultural history of Georgia, the Caucasus and Central Asia, theories of world literature, and modern Indian literature and politics. He is the author of The Imperial Sublime. A Russian Poetics of Empire (2003), and is currently completing a book-length study entitled City of Crossroads. Tiflis Modernism and the Russian-Georgian Encounter, which explores the multilingual cultural production of Tbilisi, Georgia, during the late-tsarist and revolutionary eras as a case-study in “peripheral” modernization and colonial urbanism. Recent articles by Ram include “Futurist Geographies: Centre, Periphery and the Struggle for Aesthetic Autonomy: Paris, Italy, Russia, 1909-1914,” The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Ed. Mark Wollaeger (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 313-340, and “The Literary Origins of the Georgian Feast. The Cosmopolitan Poetics of a National Ritual,” Ab Imperio (4/2014),19-50. Two of Ram’s forthcoming articles are “World Literature and Socialist Internationalism: Velimir Khlebnikov’s Zangezi and the Utopian Geopoetics of the Russian Avant-garde” (for the volume Comintern Aesthetics), and “The Scale of Global Modernisms” (PMLA).
Kat Reischl is Assistant Professor in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. Her research interests lie primarily in the intersections of literature, art and culture in twentieth-century Russia, with particular attention paid to questions of authorship and problems of mediation. She is currently completing a manuscript on photography and writing in Russia, which considers the of photography and writing in the texts of author-photographers including Leonid Andreev, Mikhail Prishvin, ll’ia Ehrenburg, among many others. At Princeton, she is involved in a multi-faceted research project on Soviet children’s books housed in the Cotsen collection, which includes a forthcoming article on transportation for an edited volume for the “Pedagogy of Images,” and a large-scale digital humanities project on illustration in Soviet children’s books.
Mehrenegar Rostami is a PhD student in UCLA’s Department of Ethnomusicology. Her dissertation focuses on modern manifestations of the Silk Road phenomenon and questions the sociopolitical implications of intercultural musical encounters within the context of world music festivals. She completed her B.A. in music at Azad University of Tehran, where she studied the Persian traditional music repertoire and researched the connections between Indian folk music and Iranian classical music. Her thesis was published in the Iranian music periodical Art & Music in 2004. She continued her education in music and dance studies at Paris Lodron University of Salzburg with a focus on systematic musicology. For her Master’s degree in ethnomusicology at Memorial University of Newfoundland, she wrote a major research paper on the role of improvisation and intercultural encounters among the musicians of the Silk Road Ensemble. Her other research interests include Central Asian and Middle Eastern music and the effects of globalization and neoliberal capitalism on musical encounters, politics, and philosophy. She is the current Reviews Editor of Ethnomusicology Review and an avid santur player. She has performed extensively in Iran, Europe, and North America.
Ivan Sablin is Associate Professor at the School of History and Research Fellow at the Center for Historical Research of the National Research University – Higher School of Economics, Saint Petersburg, and associate researcher at the University of Heidelberg from which he received his PhD. His research interests include global history of the nineteenth and twentieth century (with the focus on Asia), transcultural interactions in Siberia, and early Soviet Union. He is the author of Governing Post-Imperial Siberia and Mongolia, 1911–1924: Buddhism, Socialism and Nationalism in State and Autonomy Building (London: Routledge, 2016). Ivan Sablin wrote several articles on indigenous peoples in Soviet Siberia, including a study of Rytkheu’s autobiographies.
Nari Shelekpayev is Lecturer and Ph.D. Candidate in History at the Université de Montréal and Associate Doctoral Fellow (2016-2019) at the International Research Group ‘Diversity’, co-financed by federal governments of Germany and Canada. Shelekpayev holds Master’s degree in Social Sciences from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (2013). His current research focuses on the elaboration of capital cities between 1850s and 2000s in Brazil, Canada, and Kazakhstan in transnational and comparative perspectives. In 2015 he was a Ph.D. Scholar-in-Residence at the Canadian Center for Architecture. In addition to chapters and book-reviews, he has edited a collective book Empires, Nations and Private Lives: Essays on the Social and Cultural History of the Great War (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016) adopting a transnational approach to the history of the WWI and striving to apprehend its peripheral geographical spaces, particularly Central Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Since 2013 he has been part of the Central Eurasian Scholars & Media Initiative (CESMI), a Swiss non-governmental organization that works to promote dialogue between the media and researchers studying Central Asia.
Perry Sherouse is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Princeton University. From 2014-2015 he was Visiting Assistant Professor and OK/UM Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Oberlin College. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2014. His research is on language politics and physical culture in Tbilisi, Georgia. He has recently published an article about weightlifting in Georgia (“Skill and Masculinity in Olympic Weightlifting: Training Cues and Cultivated Craziness in Georgia”), and continues to research Soviet and post-Soviet sports. His research on language and technology has appeared in Language & Communication and Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. He is working on a book manuscript on Russian language use in Tbilisi since the collapse of the Soviet Union, titled Interface and Residue: Linguistic Code in Post-Soviet Georgia.
Nariman Skakov is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford, where he studied literary theory and the interaction between the textual and the visual in cinema. In addition to his first book, The Cinema of Tarkovsky: Labyrinths of Space and Time (I.B. Tauris/Macmillan, 2012), he has written a number of articles and book chapters. Most recently, he has edited and coordinated the production of two clusters: “Platonov’s Turkmenia” in Slavic Review (Vol. 73, No. 4, 2014), and “The Prigov Concept,” in Russian Review (Vol. 75, No. 2, 2016), each of which includes articles and introductions by Skakov (the introduction to “The Prigov Concept” is co-written with Mark Lipovetsky). Skakov’s current research focuses on the ideological and artistic construction of the space of Central Asia as the Soviet Orient in the 1930s.
Maria Sonevytsky is Assistant Professor of Music (Ethnomusicology) at Bard College. Before arriving at Bard, she held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Recent publications include work on the cultural ecology of folklore in post-Chornobyl Ukraine, and a forthcoming article on a “freak-cabaret” performance during the Ukrainian Maidan Revolution. She has previously published on ethnographic representation in the post-Soviet world, the racialized accordion in the United States, and Crimean Tatar popular music. Her multi-media public ethnomusicology project “No Other Home: The Crimean Tatar Repatriates” was published online in Triple Canopy and in the Polish journal Pressje, and was shown in museums in New York, Kyiv, and Bucharest. In 2011, she spearheaded The Chornobyl Songs Project, which culminated with multimedia performances in four cities; a Smithsonian Folkways recording was released in April of 2015. She is currently completing a manuscript on popular music between the Orange and Maidan Revolutions in Ukraine, titled “Wild Music: Sovereign Imaginaries and Popular Music in Revolutionary Ukraine.” She has performed in a variety of musical genres as an accordionist, vocalist, and pianist.
Łukasz Stanek is Lecturer at the Manchester Architecture Research Centre, University of Manchester. Stanek authored Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and edited the first publication in any language of Lefebvre’s book about architecture, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). Stanek’s second field of research is the architecture of socialist countries during the Cold War in a global perspective, and he recently edited the book Team 10 East. Revisionist Architecture in Real Existing Modernism (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw/ Chicago University Press, 2014). His current project focuses on the mobility of architectural knowledge between European socialist countries, Africa and the Middle East after the Second World War. On this topic, he published award-winning papers “Miastoprojekt Goes Abroad: The Transfer of Architectural Labour from Socialist Poland to Iraq (1958–1989)”; Mobilities of Architecture in the Global Cold War”; and “Architects from Socialist Countries in Ghana (1957–67): Modern Architecture and Mondialisation”, as well as the exhibition catalogue Postmodernism Is Almost All Right. Polish Architecture After Socialist Globalization (2012). He taught at the ETH Zurich and Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and received fellowships from the Jan van Eyck Academie, Canadian Center for Architecture, Institut d’Urbanisme de Paris, and the Center for Advanced Studies in Visual Arts (CASVA), National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., where he was the 2011-2013 A. W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow.
Ronald Grigor Suny is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago, and Senior Researcher at the National Research University – Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The grandson of the composer and ethnomusicologist Grikor Mirzaian Suni and a graduate of Swarthmore College and Columbia University, he taught at Oberlin College (1968-1981), as visiting professor of history at the University of California, Irvine (1987), and Stanford University (1995-1996). He was the first holder of the Alex Manoogian Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of Michigan (1981-1995), where he founded and directed the Armenian Studies Program. He was Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2015 and director of the Eisenberg Institute of Historical Studies from 2009 to 2012.
He is the author of The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1972); Armenia in the Twentieth Century (Scholars Press, 1983); The Making of the Georgian Nation (Indiana University Press, 1988, 1994); Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Indiana University Press, 1993); The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 1993); The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (Oxford University Press, 1998, 2011); and “They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else:” A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton University Press, 2015). He is also the editor of Transcaucasia, Nationalism and Social Change: Essays in the History of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia (Michigan Slavic Publications, 1983; University of Michigan Press, 1996), The Structure of Soviet History: Essays and Documents (Oxford University Press, 2003, 2013), and The Cambridge History of Russia, III: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and co-editor of Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History (Indiana University Press, 1989); The Russian Revolution and Bolshevik Victory: Visions and Revisions (D. C. Heath, 1990); Making Workers Soviet: Power, Culture, and Identity (Cornell University Press, 1994); Becoming National (Oxford University Press, 1996); Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation (University of Michigan Press, 1999); A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford University Press, 2001); and A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). He is currently working on a co-authored history of Russia entitled Russia’s Empires; a two-volume biography of Stalin; and a series of historiographical essays on Soviet history.
Nataliya Tchermalykh is a PhD candidate in Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. Her dissertation project explores the politicization of radical performance in Russia and Ukraine. She received her BA and MA from the Oriental Studies Department of the Kyiv National Linguistic University (Ukraine), where she worked as a faculty member between 2006 and 2014. She was a co-founder of the art journal ProSTORY in 2005. In 2015, she published Paysages Instables: Des Artistes Ukrainiens Entre Révolution et Guerre (RODOVID/Editions de la galerie PANGEE, Kiev/Montreal), in which she presents post-Maidan Ukraine through dialogues with Ukrainian artists and photographers.
Dirk Uffelmann studied Russian, Polish, Czech and German Literature at the Universities of Tübingen, Vienna, Warsaw, and Constance. He obtained his PhD from the University of Constance in 1999 and defended his second thesis (Habilitation) at the University of Bremen in 2005 before teaching as Lecturer in Russian at the University of Edinburgh. At present, he is professor of Slavic Literatures and Cultures at the University of Passau. His research interests are Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian and Central Asian literature, philosophy, religion, migration, masculinity and internet studies. Dirk Uffelmann authored 2 monographs (Die russische Kulturosophie [Russian Culturosophy] (1999), Der erniedrigte Christus – Metaphern und Metonymien in der russischen Kultur und Literatur [The Humiliated Christ: Metaphors and Metonymies in Russian Culture and Literature] (2010)) and co-edited 10 volumes (Orte des Denkens. Neue Russische Philosophie [Places of Thinking: New Russian Philosophy] (1995), Kultur als Übersetzung [Culture as Translation] (1999), Nemetskoe filosofskoe literaturovedenie nashikh dnei Contemporary German Philosophical Literary Criticism] (2001), Uskol’zaiushchii kontekst. Russkaia filosofiia v XX veke [Evading Context: Russian Philosophy under Post-Soviet Conditions] (2002), Religion und Rhetorik [Religion and Rhetoric] (2007), Contemporary Polish Migrant Culture and Literature in Germany, Ireland, and the UK (2011), Tam, vnutri. Praktiki vnutrennei kolonizatsii v kul’turnoi istorii Rossii [There within: Practices of Internal Colonisation in Russia’s Cultural History] (2012), Vladimir Sorokin’s Languages (2013), Digital Mnemonics (2014), Postcolonial Slavic Languages after Communism (2016, forthcoming). He is co-editor of the journal Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie as well as of the book series Postcolonial Perspectives on Eastern Europe and Polonistik im Kontext.
Vessela S. Warner is an Associate Professor of theatre history and dramaturgy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is also the dramaturg of Overground Physical Theatre Company in New York City. Her research focuses on cultural representations in Bulgarian, Serbian, and Macedonian post/communist theatres, and postmodern idioms in East European performance and film. Warner received an M.A. in Slavic Literatures from Sofia University, M.F.A. in theatre directing from the National Academy of Theatre and Film in Bulgaria, and a Ph.D. in theatre history and dramatic theory from the University of Washington. She has contributed to The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy (Routledge, 2014), From Exsilium to Exile: Forced Migrations in Historical Perspective (Gdańsk: Studia Historica Gedanensia, 2014), International Women Stage Directors (University of Illinois Press, 2013), Performing Worlds into Being: Native American Women’s Theatre (Miami University Press, 2009), and Theatre and Performance in Eastern Europe: The Changing Scene (Scarecrow Press, 2008), and published in TheatreForum, Slavic and East European Performance, New England Theatre Journal, Ecumenica: Journal of Theatre and Performance Balkanistica, Serbian Studies, and others. Currently, Warner is working on an international essay collection Performing Freedom: Alternative Theatre in Eastern Europe after the Fall of Communism.