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Sailing from Byzantium: An Immigrant Story
My field, Byzantine studies, became almost extinct, my advisor, the last professor in the field in my city, fell ill and lost interest in continuing her work in the field.
Breaking Taboos by Injecting the Personal: Anna Starobinets and the Tradition of Solzhenitsyn
In Russian culture, the writer often acts as a missionary, charting new paths in public discourse by broaching previously unmentionable topics. In 2017, Russian fiction writer Anna Starobinets (pictured above)...
Gesamtkunstwerk Putin?
In today's Russia, can we really speak of a new official art, constructed on the model of “Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin [Total Art of Stalinism]," whose legacy was still influential at the...
Gubernatorial Tenure, Turnover, and Succession in Russia
There are striking differences in how long regional executives remain in office in different multilevel autocracies. For example, China has a compulsory retirement rule for provincial heads at the age...
A Spectre is Haunting Russia, or A Chilling Journey from Ulyanovsk to Silicon Valley, Part I
How does the Airpod-sporting, Tesla-obsessed Ulyanovsk teen compare to Eugene Onegin with a bust of Napoleon in his study?
A Spectre is Haunting Russia, or A Chilling Journey from Ulyanovsk to Silicon Valley, Part II
As near-daily news articles expose American tech leaders’ unethical business practices and shifts into neoconservativism, we are more in need than ever of creative means for limiting their power. Maybe...
Are Russians Rejecting Authoritarianism?
In 1995, the film heroes Russians thought would make good presidential candidates were Marshal Zhukov and the Soviet agent Shtirlits. In 2019, the list is topped by Ekaterina, the single...
Will Somebody Please Write This Novel?
The dependably inventive G. Willow Wilson has just come out with a novel called Alif the Unseen, which somehow combines gray hat Arab hackers, would-be Islamic terrorists, and troublemaking djinns...
Notre Dame de Russian Social Media Bullsh*t
Ksenia Sobchak has revealed her true colors.
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...
Baltic Orthodox Monasticism
On 26 August 2018, an icon procession left the red-brick gates of the Pühtitsa convent, eastern Estonia: nuns in jet-black habits, priests in aqua vestments, and choristers in crimson velvet...
What do Scholars of Russia owe Ukraine?
As scholars of Russia, we need to undertake a searching moral inventory to see the ways in which we have taken the Russian state’s point of view as a default.
Project 1917: A Revolutionary Year Reimagined through Social Media
In today’s Russia, where government propaganda consistently denies society’s inherent complexity, Project 1917 offers a space that supports civil discourse and challenges official narratives. Only when history belongs to the...
Russian media experts debate propaganda and the clash of journalistic cultures
On September 30, 2015, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, in partnership with the NYU Global and Joint Program Studies, welcomed four experts for a panel...
Russia's Relations with the West one Year after the US Presidential Elections
One year after the US presidential elections, what is the current state of US-Russian/Eurasian relations and what can we expect for the future?
Excerpt from "Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians between World Orders," Part II
The physical disposition of the books in the crowded space of the Russkaia biblioteka in Riga, Latvia corresponds to the relative relevance of its holdings for readers.
Ksenia Sobchak, puzzled by sexism
Is it possible to be disappointed in Ksenia Sobchak?
Reintroducing Russia
Show of hands by all the Russia watchers out there: in any of the scenarios in which Russia not only returned to the news, but became a cultural flashpoint, did...
Pussy Riot: Good News and Bad News
Why does the first piece of good news in the Pussy Riot case feel like bad news?
Pussy Riot: the telenovela?
The Pussy Riot case has already run the gamut of available genres, from performance art to legal drama to kangaroo court. Now it's taken a turn towards soap opera.