Editors:
Andrew Chapman
Andrew Chapman (PhD, Russian Literature and Culture, University of Pittsburgh) is Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian Studies at The College of William and Mary. He previously worked as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Leslie Center for the Humanities and the Russian Department at Dartmouth College. Andrew is currently working on his first monograph, titled Queuetopia: Allocating Culture/Imagining Abundance, which focuses on second-world cultural production of the Soviet period and how it was constructed through discourses of scarcity and abundance. In the context of new media, Andrew’s interests range from the digital influences on the aesthetics of contemporary Russian cinema, to the coopting of online media in popular culture and lastly, the place of the amateur artist in the digital age. His research has appeared in Digital Icons, KinoKultura, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinemas, and Studies in Slavic Cultures.
Alyssa DeBlasio
Alyssa DeBlasio is Assistant Professor in the Russian Department at Dickinson College, where she also contributes to the Philosophy Department and the Film Studies program. She has published articles and film reviews in the Russian Review, Studies in East European Thought, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, KinoKultura, and Epistemologiia i filosofiia nauki (Epistemology and the Philosophy of Science). In 2014 she published The End of Russian Philosophy (Palgrave), which looks at the transition of the discipline of philosophy in Russia from the 1990s through the 2000s. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright-Hays, the Yegor Gaidar Foundation, and the American Council of Teachers of Russian.
Contributors:
Irina Aristarkhova
Irina Aristarkhova is an Associate Professor of Art & Design, History of Art, and Women’s Studies and an affiliate faculty at the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is also a Visiting Professor in Media Art Cultures at Danube University Krems (Austria). She is the author of “Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture” (Columbia University Press, 2012); the editor and a contributor to “Woman Does Not Exist: Contemporary Studies of Sexual Difference” (Syktyvkar and Moscow, 1999), and the editor of the Russian translation of Luce Irigaray’s “An Ethics of Sexual Difference” (Moscow, 2005). In 2002 Irina Aristarkhova, together with Faith Wilding, Coco Fusco and Maria Fernandez, started “Undercurrents” – an online discussion forum about intersections of cyberfeminism, new technologies, postcoloniality and globalization. In 2011 Ana Prvacki collaborated with Irina Aristarkhova on 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts No. 043: The Greeting Committee Reports…, which was a part of Documenta 13 publication series. Aristarkhova’s current project engages aesthetics of hospitality in contemporary art. Her work has been translated into Romanian, German, Chinese, Dutch, Slovenian, Portuguese and Greek. She blogs at www.russianfeminist.com, exploring issues of Soviet and post-Soviet culture from a comparative feminist perspective.
Chip Crane
Chip Crane received his PhD from the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh. His dissertation dealt with the relationship of the Blue Blouse amateur theatre movement to spatial practices in the early Soviet Union. He has published articles and reviews dealing with Soviet, Russian, Ukrainian, and Yakut theatre and cinema in KinoKultura, Performing Arts Resources, Slavic and East European Journal, Text and Presentation, Theatre Journal and Theatre Survey. He is currently an instructor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh.
Cassio de Oliveira
Cassio de Oliveira is Lecturer in Russian in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages at Vanderbilt University. He holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale (2014). He is currently at work on a book manuscript based on his dissertation, provisionally entitled Writing Rogues: The Soviet Picaresque, 1921-1938, in which he analyzes the appearance of the picaresque mode in Soviet literature in the context of various nation- and empire-building projects of the NEP era and High Stalinism. He has published his research in, among others, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Slavonica, and Studies in Slavic Cultures.
Natascha Drubek
Natascha Drubek is Heisenberg Fellow at the University of Regensburg. She completed her MA and PhD in Slavic Studies & History of Eastern Europe at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (Munich) where she also received her habilitation. She was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship at the Film School FAMU in Prague with the project “Hypertextual Film Presentation.” Since 2003 she has been the editor of the Film & Screen Media section of www.ARTMargins.com. Natascha is the author/co-editor of several books on Russian and Czech literature, culture and film: Gogol’s eloquent corporis (1998), Juden und Judentum in Literatur und Film des slavischen Sprachraums. Die geniale Epoche (1999), Apparatur und Rhapsodie. Zu den Filmen Dziga Vertovs(2000), Das Zeit-Bild im osteuropäischen Film nach 1945 (2010). Her last book which is about early Russian cinema, mainly Evgenii Bauer’s films, was published under the title Russisches Licht. Von der Ikone zum frühen sowjetischen Kino (2012). Currently she is researching anti-religious films of the first two Soviet decades (cf. the database http://www.oei-dokumente.de/filmDB/filmdblist.php) and the films shot in the ghetto Theresienstadt 1942-45. Recent and forthcoming publications: the “thing” in silent cinema, Eisenstein’s “visual music,” A Doppelgänger in Prague: The Novel Otchaianie by Nabokov (1932) and Hackenschmied’s “Aimless Walk” (1930), Dostoevskii’s notebooks, the Gosfil’mofond festival in Belye Stolby (in: Film Festival Yearbook 5: Archival Film Festivals), Gender in Russian national habitus (about the films Rusalka, Ovsianki & Krai) and “The Timing of Russian Film Premieres: Sacralizing National History and Nationalizing Religion in Russia” (in: Iconic Turns. Nation and Religion in Eastern European Cinema since 1989). In 2014, she launched an open-source journal APPARATUS: Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe.
Vitaly Kurennoj
Vitaly Kurennoj is head of the School of Cultural Studies at National Research University – Higher School of Economics and an editor of the journal Logos. He is the author of numerous articles, translations (from German and English), and monographs, including The Philosophy of Film: An Exercise in Analysis (New Literary Observer, 2009) and Thinking Russia: A Cartography of Contemporary Intellectual Directions I and II (Nasledie Evrazii, 2006 and 2009).
Stephen M. Norris
Stephen M. Norris is Professor of History and Assistant Director of the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University (OH). He is the author of A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812-1945 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2006) and Blockbuster History in the New Russia: Movies, Memory, Patriotism (Indiana University Press, 2012). He has also co-edited three books on Russian history and culture: Preserving Petersburg: History, Memory, Nostalgia (with Helena Goscilo, Indiana University Press, 2008); Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema (with Zara Torlone, Indiana University Press, 2008); and Russia’s People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present (with Willard Sunderland, Indiana University Press, 2012). He is currently writing a biography of the Soviet political caricaturist, Boris Efimov (1900-2008).
Daria Shembel
Daria Shembel earned her Ph.D in Slavic Studies and Film from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 2009. Since 2005 she has been teaching European Studies, New Media and Film at San Diego State University. Her primary academic interests lie in Soviet and European film theories and histories, new media/old media historiography, Russian Modernism with an emphasis on poetry and visual culture, global, European and Eastern European media.
Irina Souch
Irina Souch has a background in Germanic Philology, Translation, and Literary Studies. She holds a position of Affiliate Researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) of the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include contemporary Russian philosophy, critical theory, film, and social media. She is currently working on a book in which she analyses post-Soviet popular television series and films to address the questions of formation, assertion, and representation of Russian identities.
Theodora Trimble
Theodora Trimble received her MA in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies from University of Michigan (2011) and is a fourth year PhD student at University of Pittsburgh in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her interests span a wide range of topics across Russian culture, film, and television. Her dissertation project examines Soviet popular culture of the 1950s and 60s through the construction of post-Stalinist celebrities.