The unique strength of our research program lies in broad coverage of diverse languages and cultures across the Slavic world (Czech, Polish, Russian, South Slavic, and Ukrainian), coupled with cross-disciplinary and comparative approaches that bring together a wide variety of research methods and theoretical commitments. Our work spans the particular and the universal, grounded in the thoughtful command of a textual corpus (literary, cinematic, artistic) and in its connection to theories and methods that open onto broader cultural and historical phenomena.

We are interested in the category of the aesthetic or the cultural as it is defined by its autonomous form, its fictionality, or its status as a diversion apart from the instrumental economy, but we are also interested in contextualizing aesthetic texts and perceiving in cultural documents their expression of social and economic facts. Our work engages histories of reception, interpretation, and mediation in literary and cultural studies and explores the positionality of reading and writing practices.

Research areas

• Comparative Slavic
• Film Studies
• Folklore
• Literary and Intellectual History
• Materialism and Aesthetics
• Memory and Trauma Studies
• Migration
• Postcolonial and Postcommunist/Postsocialist
• Translation Studies