Agenda

1. Please provide a brief outline of your training and scientific activity.
Before I joined the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Sheffield I worked in the Soviet Union (Odessa State University, Moscow State University, the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow), in the US (Duke University, Stanford University, Amherst College, University of California), and in the UK at the University of Nottingham. I also held research fellowships at a Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre, at the New York University International Centre for Advanced Studies and at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge. I have also been a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, an AHRC Grant, EURIAS Senior Fellowship at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, the Fernand Braudel Fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence and the Senior Research Fellowship at the University of Hokkaido. I have taught academic seminars and delivered public lectures in Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Russia, China, Japan, Korea, the UK, and across the United States. My research interests lie in Soviet and post-Soviet literature and culture, Stalinism, Socialist Realism, Soviet national literatures, Russian and Soviet film, critical theory and Soviet cultural history.

2. Please state your reasons for choosing Venice and the Department for your research and teaching stay and what are your expectations regarding our University in general and our Department in particular?
For someone who travel so much, who enjoys new environments, meeting new colleagues and immersing in new cultures, Venice is the place to be since this has always been a major juncture of cultural roads of the modern world. I am finishing the book on Stalinization of Eastern European Literatures after WWII, and the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies at Ca’Foscari is internationally known for bringing together scholars who are seriously interested in and who have contributed to interdisciplinary cultural and literary studies on Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans. To be part of such a research community while I am working on my project would be enormously stimulating, would no doubt expand my own horizons, and would make it easier for me to further develop a comparative perspective on my subject.