Link to her profile

In addition to her appointment in the Slavic Department, Dr. Bourlatskaya directs the Russian Language and Culture Program at the Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies. Dr. Bourlatskaya specializes in teaching advanced Russian content-based courses for business professionals with the use of film and literature, as well as political and business materials. Her current research interests lie in techniques for training business professionals to develop and assess cross-cultural competency.

Link to his profile

Dr. Burke-White specializes in international law and international relations, particularly regarding the impact of international legal regimes on domestic governance, with background and interest in Russia and the former Soviet Union. Burke-White’s current research project explores the impact of the rise of Russia and China and the new global energy politics on the structure, substance, and enforcement of international legal rules.

Link to his profile

Michel Guillot's research focuses on mortality and formal demography. During the past three years, he has completed work on tempo effects in mortality, demographic measurement, and mortality dynamics in developing countries, in particular in former Soviet Central Asia. In the area of demographic measurement, Guillot has proposed a new approach for estimating health expectancies in the absence of longitudinal data. In his work in former Soviet Central Asia, Guillot finds that adult mortality in Kyrgyzstan is lower than in Russia (a much richer country), in part because of cultural differences related to alcohol consumption. More generally, he finds important differences in the nature of the post-Soviet health crisis in Central Asia and Russia. These findings have health policy implications in countries of the former USSR.

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.

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.

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).

Kevin M. F. Platt is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Graduate Chair of the Comparative Literature Program. He works on representations of Russian history, Russian historiography, and history and memory in Russia. Additionally, he frequently writes on Russian lyric poetry. Platt received his B.A. from Amherst College and his Ph.D. from Stanford University and taught at Pomona College before joining the Penn faculty in 2002. He is the author of Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths (Cornell UP, 2011) and History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution (Stanford, 1997; Russian edition 2006), and the co-editor (with David Brandenberger) of Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Wisconsin UP, 2006). Platt has published chapters and articles on Russian history and historiography, film, art and poetry. He also edited and contributed translations to Modernist Archaist: Selected Poems by Osip Mandelstam (Whale and Star, 2008) and edited Intimations: Selected Poetry by Anna Akhmatova, translated by James Falen (Whale and Star, 2010). His current projects include a critical historiography of Russia, a study of contemporary Russian culture in Latvia and a number of translation projects.

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).

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.

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.

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).

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.

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).