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The Americans: "Take Your Daughter to Work" Day
Previously, on the Walking Dead…
The Americans: The Marriage Plot against America
Even if our heroes survive the season, their future looks bleak.
Money Is Not Enough: The Role of Economic Incentives in Cooperative Nonproliferation Initiatives
The current main threats to Russian nuclear materials are determined insiders, coupled with a questionable commitment by Moscow to ensuring sustainability and improving security culture.
Women Soldiers: Anna Krylova and Soviet Gender Categories
Elizabeth Banks is a Graduate Student in NYU's History Department. “God blessed Vasilisa with the greatest courage of all” Last Friday the Jordan Center joined with the NYU History Department’s...
Open Letter on the Termination of Russian Studies Faculty at Ohio University
Like you, we are wholeheartedly invested in the survival and recovery of higher education in the United States amid the COVID-19 pandemic. That recovery depends on the will of universities...
Talking with Yanni Kotsonis about "States of Obligation"
Most people would think taxes and Russia, and then think beatings, unfairness, repression, burden, squalor, and an overbearing state. That’s plain wrong.
Upcoming Columbia Event
In Search of Empire: the 400th Anniversary of the House of Romanov February 14th-16th 2013 Co-sponsored by the Bakhmeteff Archive, the Harriman Institute, the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia...
Balanchine’s Neoclassical Serenade and the Washington Ballet’s New Signature Style
The Washington Ballet’s production of George Balanchine’s Serenade this past weekend at the Kennedy Center was a watershed moment for the company. The program heralded the emergence of a Washington...
Gender Trouble in The Double: Masculinity in Dostoevsky’s Novella and Ayoade’s Film
Right from the outset, Ayoade’s film establishes the presence of a masculine hierarchy.
Gothic Doubling and The Double, Gothically
Dostoevsky was well aware of the power of the gothic.
The Post-Soviet Future of FX's The Americans: A Modest Proposal
It’s time for The Americans to jump the shark.
No Netflix, No Chill: Russia’s Culture Minister Would Rather Purge than Binge
In the West, we’ve long been familiar with the clear and present danger of Netflix.
Roaming Academics: An Immigrant Story
People ask me all the time where I will, or want to live when I finish my PhD, as if I am supposed to be able to answer that question.
How the Soviet Experience Shapes Crime and Punishment in Russia Today
Russia has been justifiably called a Mafia-state. Yet for two centuries it had been making steady progress toward the rule of law and a predictable, impartial, accessible, and fair criminal...
Russian Symbolists and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Part I
“Absurd!” “Perverse!” “Puerile!” “Frantic trash!” Thus fumed London critics who attended the 1850 exhibition of the little-known Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. For the three young artists who dreamt of revolutionizing the Royal...
The Creation of Soviet National Consciousness, or Why Nadezhda Krupskaya Matters
Locating the female subject in early Soviet history has been a broader impetus for my investigation of the relationship between gender and nationalism in the formation of the Soviet state....
Life with the Russian Émigré Community of Australia
When I married a Russian Australian and moved to Sydney in 2019, my family friends shook their heads, as if to say, “Here we go, another one of our girls...
Review: "I Want a Baby and Other Plays" by Sergei Tretyakov, Translated by Robert Leach and Stephen Holland
This new collection of plays by Sergei Tretyakov, translated by Robert Leach and Stephen Holland, attempts to solidify Tretyakov’s role in the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde Canon. In his introduction, Leach...
Excerpt from "Sex Work in Contemporary Russia: A Cultural Perspective," Part I
The character of the female sex worker has recurred pervasively across time, space, and genre, repeatedly used by writers, filmmakers, artists, intellectuals, and politicians to explore anxieties about the disruptive...
From the Paris Committee to “Polish Carbonarism”: Conspiracy Mythology and the Political Imagination in Russia in the Age of Revolution
The idea of conspiracy by secret societies became a pivotal official myth in the Russian Empire from the 1770s on, shaping governmental discourse, diplomatic relations, ideology, and security policy.