russian, eastern european, and eurasian studies @ penn
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russian, eastern european, and eurasian studies @ penn
*Rollover or Click on stars for more information*
Stephen Amico, Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, Slavic and Music Departments, SAS
Dr. Amico is an Ethnomusicologist whose teaching and research focus on American and Russian popular musics, contemporary dance music, and gender andsexuality. A Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at UPenn, he has previously taught within the City University of New York system, and has published articles in the journal Popular Music and Queering the Popular Pitch. He is currently working on a manuscript focusing on homosexuality in Russian popular music, as well as a study devoted to Russian pop “divas,” a portion of which has recently been published in the journal Popular Music and Society.
Peter Holquist, Associate Professor, History Department, SAS
Dr. Holquist's teaching and research focus upon the history of Russia and modern Europe. He is the author of Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia 's Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921(Harvard UP, 2002), and is founder and editor of the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. Holquist has published articles on Russia's experience during the First World War and the Russian Revolution, questions of continuity and change from the imperial period into the Stalin era and other topics. Holquist's current project, By Right of War¸ explores the emergence of the international law of war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Holquist received his PhD with distinction from Columbia University in 1995. Prior to joining Penn's History Department in Fall 2006, he taught for nine years at Cornell University.
Selected and Recent Publications:
"Violent Russia, Deadly Marxism? Russia in the Epoch of Violence, 1905–21," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4/3 (Summer 2003): 627-52.
"‘Information is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work’: Bolshevik Surveillance in its Pan-European Perspective," Journal of Modern History 69/3 (1997): 415-50.
Benjamin Nathans, Associate Professor, History Department, SAS
Dr. Nathans is the Ronald S. Lauder Endowed Term Associate Professor of History. His fields of research and teaching include: Russian Empire, Soviet Union, modern Jewish history, ethnic and religious relations, law, human rights, dissident movements. He is the author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (UC Press, 2002), and co-editor (with Gabriella Safran) of Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe (Penn Press, 2008). Dr. Nathans' current research explores the history of dissent in the USSR from Stalin's death to the collapse of communism. It traces the paths by which Soviet dissidents found their way to the doctrine of inalienable rights — the world's first universal ideology — and employed rights doctrine in an attempt to place limits on the sovereignty of the Soviet state.
Selected and Recent Publications:
"The Dictatorship of Reason: Aleksandr Vol’pin and the Idea of Rights under ‘Developed Socialism’," Slavic Review 66/4 (Winter 2007): 630-63
Adriana Petryna, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, SAS
Dr. Petryna’s research explores the cultural and political aspects of science in contexts of crisis (Ukraine and Russia), and the ethical and regulatory norms informing clinical trial offshoring (Eastern Europe). She is author of Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl (Princeton UP, 2002) and co-editor of Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices (Duke UP, 2006).
Selected and Recent Publications:
"Science and Citizenship under Postsocialism," Social Research 70/2 (Summer 2003): 551-78.
"Ethical variability: Drug development and globalizing clinical trials," American Ethnologist 32/2 (2005): 183-97.
Kevin M. F. Platt, Associate Professor, Slavic Department, SAS
Dr. Platt is Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. His main focus of research is the relationship between history, politics and cultural life in Modern Russia. He also works on Russian poetry and poetics. He is the author of History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution (Stanford UP, 1997), and the co-editor (with David Brandenberger) of Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Wisconsin UP, 2006). Dr. Platt is currently completing a book about the modern historical and cultural mythologies of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great entitled Terror and Greatness: Ivan IV and Peter I, as Russian Myths.
Selected and Recent Publications:
Monroe Price, Professor, Annenberg School
Link to his profile
Dr. Price is Director of the Center for Global Communications Studies at the Annenberg School. He studies comparative approaches to the regulation of media and the interconnection between distribution of information and the public sphere, especially in transitional societies. Professor Price helped found the Moscow Media Law and Policy Institute (MGU), and chairs the Centre for Media and Communications Studies at Central European University. He co-edited, with Andrei Richter and Peter Yu, Russian Media Law and Policy in the Yeltsin Decade: Essays and Documents (Kluwer Law International, 2002) and, with Mark Thompson, Forging Peace: Intervention, Human Rights and the Management of Media Space (Indiana University Press, 2003). He is the author ofMedia and Sovereignty, The Global Information Revolution and Its Challenge to State Power (MIT Press, 2002).
Maria Shardakova, Lecturer in Foreign Languages, Slavic Department, SAS
Dr. Shardakova is the Russian Language Coordinator for the Penn Slavic Department. Her research focuses on language policy and planning viz. the former Soviet republics; Russian-American cross-cultural studies, particularly with respect to linguistic communication, and language pedagogy.
Selected and Recent Publications:
"Intercultural Pragmatics in the Speech of American L2 Learners of Russian: Apologies offered by Americans in Russian," Intercultural Pragmatics 2/4 (2005):423-53.
"Identity Options in Russian Textbooks," Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 3/1 (2004): 1-24, co-authored with Aneta Pavlenko.
Rudra Sil, Associate Professor, Political Science Department, SAS
Dr. Sil is Undergraduate Chair in the Department of Political Science. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley (1996). He is author of Managing ‘Modernity’: Work, Community, and Authority in Late-Industrializing Japan and Russia (U of Michigan Press, 2002) and coeditor of several books, including The Politics of Labor in a Global Age: Continuity and Change in Late-Industrializing and Post-Socialist Economies (Oxford UP, 2001), with Christopher Candland, and World Order After Leninism (U of Washington Press, 2006), with Vladimir Tismaneanu and Marc Howard. His articles have appeared in journals such as Europe-Asia Studies, Studies in Comparative International Development, Polity, and The Journal of Theoretical Politics. Dr. Sil is currently completing an article analyzing the relationship between the analytic and geographic boundaries associated with the concept of "postcommunism" as well as a larger book project comparing the evolution of industrial relations and labor politics across Russia, Eastern Europe and China.
Peter Steiner, Professor, Slavic Department, SAS
Dr. Steiner’s research focuses on literary theory and modern Slavic literature and culture. He is author of Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics (Cornell UP, 1984) and The Deserts of Bohemia: Czech Fiction and Its Social Context (Cornell UP, 2000), as well as the editor of several collections of articles.
Selected and Recent Publications:
"Genre and Ideology in Vladimír Holan’s Red Army Soldiers," Slavic Review 66/4 (Winter 2007): 702-18.
"Justice in Prague, Political and Poetic: Some Reflections on the Slánský Trial (with Constant Reference to Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera)" Poetics Today 21/4 (Winter 2000): 653-79.
Vladislav Todorov, Senior Lecturer, Slavic Department, SAS
Vladislav Todorov received his Ph.D. from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (1988) and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (1996.) He is the author of several scholarly books on modernism, political aesthetics, performing and visual arts, terrorism and global governance. He has contributed articles and essays to journals such as The Yale Journal of Criticism, College Literature, L'infini, Neue Literatur, Likovne Besede, etc. He has served as a columnist and regular commentator for a number of major Bulgarian weekly and daily papers and as guest editor of "Publish and Perish," a recent Poetics Today special issue on samizdat.
He is the author of Zift (2008) a Bulgarian movie based on his eponymous novel (2006). The movie was selected for the official competitions and was awarded number of national and international film awards at prestigious film festivals such as Moscow IFF, Toronto IFF, Mar Del Plata IFF, Santa Barbara IFF, etc. For the novel and the screenplay he was nominated for several national literary and film awards. His first creative pieces were published in the US by Post Modern Culture and the New York literary journal Chelsea. Presently he works on his second screenplay Zincograph, which was awarded the Balkan Fund Script Development Award (2008).
Selected and Recent Publications:
Chaotic Pendulum: Inquiries in Terrorism and Governmentality. (Sofia: Espace Culture, 2005).
Short Paradox for the Theater and Other Figures of Life. (Sofia: Sofia UP, 1997).
Red Square, Black Square: Organon for Revolutionary Imagination. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995)
The Adam Complex: Essays in Politics and Culture. (Sofia: Ivan Vazov, 1991)
Julia Verkholantsev, Assistant Professor, Slavic Department, SAS
Dr. Verkholantsev is a specialist in Czech, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian cultural histories, and in early modern and medieval literary and linguistic culture. She has published on the cultural history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Ruthenian lands and on the circulation and adaptation of Catholic and Protestant texts among Orthodox Ruthenians.
Selected and Recent Publications:
"Ruthenica Bohemica: Ruthenian Translations from Czech in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poland," Slavische Sprachgeschichte, Bd 3 (Wien: LIT-Verlag. 2008).
"Speculum Slaviae Orientalis: Muscovy, Ruthenia and Lithuania in the Late Middle Ages," UCLA Slavic Studies, n.s., IV (Moscow: Novoe Izdatel’stvo. 2005).
Ilya Vinitsky, Assistant Professor, Slavic Department, SAS
Dr. Vinitsky received his PhD habilitation (doktorskaia) from the Moscow State Pedagogical University. His research centers on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature and intellectual history, the history of psychology, and Russian futurism. He is author of Dom tolkovatelia: Poeticheskaia semantika i istoricheskoe voobrazhenie V.A. Zhukovskogo (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2006) and co-editor, with Angela Brintlinger, of Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture (U of Toronto Press, 2007). Dr. Vinitsky has recently completed a book Modern Spiritualism and Russian Culture in the Age of Realism (under review with U of Toronto Press). His other current project is a book on a cultural history of Russian literature, co-authored with Professor Andrew B. Wachtel of Northwestern University (under contract with Polity Press, UK).
Selected and Recent Publications:
"Table Talks: The Spiritualist Controversy of the 1870s and Dostoevsky," Russian Review, 67/1 (January 2008): 88–109.
"Where Bobok Is Buried: The Theosophical Roots of Dostoevskii's 'Fantastic Realism,'" Slavic Review, 65/3 (Fall 2006): 523-43.
"Obshchestvo mertvykh poetov: Spiriticheskaia poeziia kak kul’turnyi fenomen vtoroi poloviny XIX veka," Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 71 (2005).
Valery Yakubovich, Associate Professor, Department of Management, Wharton School
Dr. Yakubovich’s research focuses on coordination mechanisms in external and internal labor markets, social networks, the impact of modern telecommunication technologies on the employment relationship, and the employment relationship in Russia
Selected and Recent Publications:
“Passive Recruitment in the Russian Urban Labor Market.” Work and Occupations, 33(3): 307-334. DOI: 10.1177/1054773804271935, 2006.
"Weak Ties, Information, and Influence: How Workers Find Jobs in a Local Russian Labor Market.” American Sociological Review, 70(3): 408-21, 2005.
Ashwin, Sarah and Valery Yakubovich. 2005. “Cherchez la Femme: Women as Supporting Actors in the Russian Labor Market.” European Sociological Review, 21(2):149-64.