Featured
Simpler Times? Rural Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature
To ask about modernity is to ask what it is not, and anyone looking for stable definitions is sure to be disappointed.
Teaching Race in Russia: Dispatches from “The Harlem Renaissance: From New York to Tashkent”
Why do American race relations reappear over and over again in discussions of the minority experience in the former Soviet Union?
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...
Is Slavic ready for Minorities?
Very often I’m asked how Slavic Studies can attract more minorities. I’ll tell my own story.
Teaching Race in Russia Part II: From Harlem to the “Soviet South”
My students, like Vladimir Nabokov before them, were surprised at how sexualized American racism was and how often black men were lynched for charges of even looking at white women.
Teaching Race in Russia Part III: Sartre, Jazz, and the Cossack Dance
Sartre’s essay spends considerable time problematizing the intersection of communism and anti-racist politics, asking, “Can the black man count on a distant white proletariat-- involved in its own struggles?"
Regarding the Pain of Others: Tweeting Book V of Crime & Punishment
How do you tweet “pauper’s pride”?
Russian Women and the Myth of the “Right Man”
As in the West, the Russian nuclear family includes two adults raising the children; the difference is that, in the Russian case, those adults are often a mother and a...
Off-White like Dzhokhar
What do Americans see when they look at the faces of Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev? And do Russians see the same thing?
Teaching Race in Russia: Some Conclusions
I was giving the students a brief biography of Lorde and as soon as I said the phrase “black lesbian Feminist,” their eyes opened really wide. I don’t know if...
Tweets from Underground
How would Raskolnikov use Twitter?
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...
Rodion Raskolnikov, Your Tweet Archive is Ready
Two years ago, on May 1, 2016, the Twitter account @RodionTweets sent its first tweet. Since then @RodionTweets has livetweeted the events of Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, broken into...
Twitterature in the Dostoevsky Classroom
My adventure with Twitterature began three years ago, when I began to work with the North American Dostoevsky Society as their social media curator. I began a twitter account for...
Virtual Historical Mapping: Physical Spaces and Interactions Featured in “Harlem and Moscow”
I figured that I was going to school in Harlem, but learning Russian for my degree, so why not mesh the two topics together? Ultimately, the class was a rewarding...
You Want Romanovs With That?
There has long been a reluctance to accept that the Bolsheviks could, in fact, wipe out the entire imperial family and for the next seventy-five years not feel bad about...
Journalists discuss the role of race in US-Russia relations
"The alt-right has found a natural ally in Russia's current zeitgeist."
Russian scholars explore the use of the term 'biopolitics' in Jordan Center-UCL workshop series
What work is biopolitics doing as a heuristic in the Russian field?