Hana Stankova is a seventh year PhD candidate in the Yale department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her dissertation, "Transformative Journeys: Russian Turkestan's New Global Image in 19th-Century Travel Writing," brings together upwards of one hundred little-known texts by Russian, Western and Eastern European, and American writers who traveled to Turkestan between the 1820s and 1890s and contends that nineteenth century travel writing by explorers of Central Asia provides an important new lens on the shifting popular image of the region. More broadly, her research aims to contextualize Russian colonial discourse about Central Asia and the Caucasus through its intertextual, international, and interimperial dimensions. She is also interested in cultural exchanges between the Russian and French Empires, Czech language and literature, and emigre writing from the 20th century.
