MATTEO  BERTELE’ (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) is a post-doc research fellow at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He studied Russian, German and History of Art at Ca’ Foscari University, at Humboldt Universität in Berlin and at the Russian State University for Humanities (RGGU) in Moscow. In 2011 he obtained a PhD at Ca’ Foscari University. The results of his research are included in the book Russian Artists at the Venice Biennale 1895-2013, published in 2013 by Stella Art Foundation and awarded as Best book of the year by The Art Newspaper Russia. In 2011 he was appointed scientific secretary of the Centre of Studies of Russian Arts (CSAR) at Ca’ Foscari University, where he curated exhibitions of contemporary art such as “We are here” (2011), “Francisco Infante/Nonna Goriunova: Artifacts” (2012), “Capital of Nowhere: Envisioning a variable landscape” (2013) and coordinated several exhibitions of 20th century Russian art. His research interests and publications deal with Russian émigré artists in Italy, cultural relationships between GDR and USSR, Soviet non-official art, Soviet iconography in the post-socialist era, and in general with exhibition studies concerning the history of Russian, Soviet and Post-soviet art shows and collections, as well as their reception abroad.

VADIM BASS (European University, St. Petersburg) is an Associate Professor of Department of Art History, European University at St Petersburg. Candidate of Sciences (Art history, The State Russian Museum, 2006). The topic of his thesis: “Topicalization of the Classics in St. Petersburg architectural competitions of the 1900–1910s”. He has taught a wide range of courses related to theory and history of architecture at EUSP, St. Petersburg State University. Vadim is the author of St. Petersburg Neoclassical Architecture of the 1900s to 1910s as Reflected in the Mirror of Architectural Competitions: Word and Form (St. Petersburg, 2010, in Russian); also, he published multiple historical and critical essays. He hosts a radio program on architecture “4 Walls and the Roof”. His current interests are focused on interrelations between professional and social values in architecture. Research interests also include: classical tradition in architecture, architectural competitions, theory and rhetoric of architecture and architectural discourse, professional thought in architecture of the 20^th century.

MARIJETA BOZOVIC (Yale University) is a specialist in Russian and Balkan modernism. She completed her Ph.D. in Russian Literature at Columbia University in 2011. After two years at Colgate University as an Assistant Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies, she joined the Yale Slavic Department in 2013, where she teaches now. Her first book, From Onegin to Ada: Nabokov’s Canon, examines canon formation, transnational literatures, and struggles with other media. She is the co-editor of two forthcoming collected volumes, on Nabokov and Danube river studies respectively. Her current research turns to contemporary political engaged poetry in Moscow and St. Petersburg: that new book project is entitled Avant-Garde Post– : Radical Poetics After the Soviet Union. In Fall 2014, Bozovic will pilot a seminar and DH research project at Yale’s Beinecke Archive, the Digital Brodsky Lab.

JOHANNA CONTERIO (Harvard University) is a PhD Candidate in the history department at Harvard University. Her dissertation is entitled, “The Soviet Sanatorium: Medicine, Nature and Mass Culture in Sochi, 1917-1991.” In May, Johanna will start a three year post-doc in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of London, Birkbeck College, where she will contribute to a Wellcome Trust-funded project entitled “The Reluctant Internationalists: A History of Public Health and International Organisations, Movements and Experts in Twentieth Century Europe.” Her research interests are at the intersection of the cultural, environmental and medical history of the Soviet Union.

COURTNEY DOUCETTE (Rutgers University) is a Ph.D. Candidate in history at Rutgers University. Her dissertation evaluates the history of Perestroika, the period of intense reform launched by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 that ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In it she excavates the socialist language of reform and asks how Soviet people across the social spectrum engaged socialism in the last years of Soviet history. The dissertation traces late Soviet history with special attention to morality and ethics. Under the auspices of an International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, Doucette will conduct twelve months of archival research in Moscow beginning in September 2014.

ANNA FISHZON (Williams College) is Assistant Professor of History, specializing in modern Russian Culture.  She teaches courses on European cultural history, Stalinism, the history of fashion, nineteenth-century Russian intellectual history, and camp.  Anna received a PhD from Columbia University and a BA from Duke University.  She is the author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin de-Siècle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, September 2013), and articles on sound recording and celebrity in late imperial Russia in Slavic Review and Russian Review.  Her current book project considers late Soviet temporality and the queerness of Brezhnev-era childhood.

DEVIN FORE (Princeton University) is an Associate Professor of German. His first book, Realism After Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (MIT/October Books, 2012) examines the returns of mimetic realism in German cultural production from the late 1920s into the Popular Front era with chapters on Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Carl Einstein, Bertolt Brecht, John Heartfield, Ernst Jünger and the industrial novel (Erik Reger, Franz Jung and Brecht). His next book, All the Graphs: Soviet Factography and the Emergence of Avant-Garde Documentary (forthcoming from University of Chicago Press), situates the work of the operative writer Sergei Tret’iakov within the material culture of early the Soviet period. He has also edited and written the introduction to the English translation of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s History and Obstinacy (forthcoming from Zone Books in Fall 2014). Fore has published articles in the journals New German Critique, October, Configurations and Grey Room, and has also translated a number of texts from both German and Russian.

ELENA GAPOVA (Western Michigan University and European Humanities University) is an Associate Professor of sociology at WMU. Her research focuses on post-Soviet nationalism, class and gender (mostly in Belarus), as well as on intellectuals and academia. She was the founding director of the Center for Gender Studies at European Humanities university.

BORIS GASPAROV (Columbia University) is Boris Bakhmeteff Professor of Russian and East European Studies, co-chair and founder of the University Seminar on Romanticism, and a member of the Seminars on Linguistics and on Slavic History and Culture. His books range from Slavic medieval studies and comparative grammar to semiotic studies of oral speech, to Pushkin and his time, to Russian modernism and twentieth century poetry. Music remains deeply embedded in his teaching, scholarship, and personal life. His book, Five Operas and a Symphony: Word and Music in Russian Culture (Yale University Press, 2005), has received the ASCAP Deems Taylor award. Gasparov’s ongoing projects include Speech, Memory, and Meaning: Intertextuality in Every-Day Language, and a book on the Early Romantic roots of modern theoretical linguistics.

PHILIP GLEISSNER (Princeton University) is a PhD student in Slavic Languages and Literatures. He has earned a Magister Artium (BA/MAequivalent) Slavic Studies, Political Science and Economics from Kiel University, Germany and was a visiting graduate Student at Penn State before joining Princeton in 2012. His main interests are Russian, Czech and German 20^th century cultures and literatures, critical theory, sociology of literature and periodical studies.

ALEXEY GOLUBEV (University of British Columbia) is a PhD Candidate in history working on the dissertation tentatively titled The Material Self of Late Socialism. His project aims to historicize the ways in which Soviet people materialized their selves in and through material objects, to explore the historical relationship between materiality and selfhood in late socialist societies, and to contribute to a more complex understanding of selfhood in the historical perspective. He received his first advanced degree of Candidate of Sciences in History in 2006 from Petrozavodsk State University (Russia), where he then worked until 2011 as a lecturer at the Department of History of Northern Europe. He co-authored the book The Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration from the United States and Canada to Soviet Karelia in the 1930s (Michigan State University Press, 2014, with Irina Takala) and is a co-editor in a large editorial team of two Northern European book projects: The Barents Region: A Transnational History of Subarctic Northern Europe and Encyclopedia of the Barents Region, both upcoming in 2014 at the PAX Press in Oslo.

IGOR GULIN (Kommersant Weekend) graduated from The Russian State University for Humanities in 2006. Currently he works as a cultural observer for Kommersant Weekend as well as other magazines and websites. His interest include Soviet culture – both underground and official – art-activism, and Russian contemporary poetry and experimental prose.

YVONNE HOWELL (University of Richmond) is a Professor of Russian and International Studies at the University of Richmond. She received her PhD is Slavic languages and literatures from University of Michigan, and taught at Dartmouth College before taking the position in Richmond, Virginia. She works on the intersections between scientific and literary culture, particularly in context of Soviet debates over genetics and sociobiology. She is also the author of Apocalyptic Realism: The Science Fiction of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1994) and is currently re-examining the legacy of Soviet science fiction in postcolonial Russian and Eurasian visions of the past and future.

POLLY JONES (University of Oxford)  is an Associate Professor and Shrecker-Barbour Fellow in Russian at University College, University of Oxford. She has previously held a lectureship at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies and fellowships at Princeton University and St Antony’s College, Oxford. She is the author of Myth, Memory, Trauma. Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union (Yale University Press, 2013) and editor of The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization (Routledge, 2006) and The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships (Palgrave, 2004). She has also written numerous articles on post-Stalinist cultural politics, and is currently working on a book project on biography in the Brezhnev era, focussing in particular on the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ (Plamennye revoliutsionery) biographical series.

ILYA KALININ (St Petersburg State University) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Smolny College). He is also Editor-in-Chief of the journal Neprikosnovennyi Zapas: Debaty o politike i kul’ture (NZ: Debates on Politics and Culture). His current research deals with problems of collective memory in post-Soviet Russia.

ILONA KISS (Russian Institute for Advanced Study / Sholokhov State University in Humanities, Moscow) holds a PhD in Theory of Literature and History of Slavic Literatures (Budapest, ELTE). Prior to working as a researcher focusing on cross-cultural issues, she pursued a public policy and diplomatic carrier. As a director of the Hungarian Cultural Centre in Moscow, and a cultural counsellor in Russia, she contributed to the reorganization of the Hungarian-Russian cultural relations. As an editor-in-chief of the Hungarian journal ”Beszélő” (former ’samizdat’ established in 1981), she focused on Central and East European social and cultural transition. Being a manager at the Budapest Open Society Institute, she coordinated a number of education projects in former Soviet countries. Since 1988 Ilona Kiss has translated and edited about 25 books and a considerable number of works of Russian philosophers and writers (N. Berdyaev, P. Florensky, Vl. Solovyov, the Slavophiles, A. Solzhenitsin, contemporary writers – Evg. Popov, L. Petrushevskaya and others). Her studies on Russian culture, society and politics (ca. 150 items) have been published in various Hungarian journals. Her current research interests are connected with the contextualization of Bulgakov’s and Florensky’s oevre in the culture of 1960-70. She is a co-author of a new adaptation ”The Master and Margarita” for the National Theatre Radu Stanca, Sibiu, Romania (directed by Z. Balázs), nominated for the Best Performance by the Theatre Union of Romania, 2013.

MICHAEL KUNICHIKA (New York University) is an Assistant Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at NYU. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2007. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard. His first book, Our Native Antiquity: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Culture of Russian Modernism (ASP, forthcoming), examines the cultural careers of two objects — the “stone women” or kamennye baby and the burial mound, or kurgans — which served as arenas in which vying conceptions of modernist aesthetics and Russian culture could be waged. He is currently at work on a second book on early Soviet cinema and the poetics and politics of time.

DANIIL  LEIDERMAN (Princeton University) is a PhD candidate, working on a dissertation entitled: Moscow Conceptualism and “Shimmering”: Authority, Anarchism, and Space. The project investigates the circle of experimental artists and writers that emerged in Moscow’s unofficial artistic scene in the early 1970s in the context of nonconformism, tracing their development of the critical metaposition called “shimmering” and its relationship to artistic resistance. In 2012, Daniil conducted and recorded a series of interviews with artists who participated in Moscow Conceptualism, he is in the process of translating and transcribing these conversations. In 2011, Daniil helped research and write for the Brooklyn Museum exhibition Russian Modern. Daniil received his B.A. from New York University in 2008.

ALAINA LEMON ( University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, and incoming Director of the Interdepartmental Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan.  She received the PhD in Anthropology in 1996 from the University of Chicago.  Her first book, Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani Memory from Pushkin to Post-Socialism (Duke, 2000) received in 2001 the AAASS Wayne S. Vucinich Book Award, and the AAASS Heldt Book Prize. Bringing together ethnographic with archival work, that book explores the racializing ironies posed by the romance of the Gypsy in the lives of Roma. Recent publications focus on sentiment and sensation, tracing lines from the seeming minutiae of interactions and performances, in their semiotic and material density, to institutions and infrastructures.  A forthcoming book juxtaposes quotidian anxieties about mental influence to utopian dreams of a world of mental communion, linking Cold War-era theatrical practice with spectacular demonstrations of paranormal science. Future plans include a return to documentary filmmaking on these and other themes.

KATARÍNA LICHVÁROVÁ (The Courtauld Institute of Art, London) is a PhD candidate at The Courtauld Institute of Art working on a thesis examining the discursive aesthetic of Viktor Pivovarov and Pavel Pepperstein. She has BA in History and Philosophy of Art from The University of Kent, and completed her MA in Global Conceptualism at The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2012.

MARK LIPOVETSKY (University of Colorado-Boulder) is a Russian-American literary scholar and critic, Professor of Russian Studies at the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures. Since the 1990s, Russian postmodernist literature and culture remain in the center of his interests. In 1996, he defended one of the first doctoral dissertations on this subject. Тhe author of numerous articles published in the US, Russia, and Europe, eight books,  and co-editor of seven volumes on Russian literature and culture. Among his monographs are the following:  Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos (1999), Modern Russian Literature: 1950s-1990s (co-authored with Naum Leiderman, 2001 and six subsequent reprints editions),  Paralogies: Transformation of (Post)modernist Discourse in Russian Culture of the 1920s-2000s  (Moscow: NLO, 2008),  Performing Violence: Literary and Theatrical Experiments of New Russian Drama (Bristol: Intellect Press, 2009, with Birgit Beumers; Russian version – 2012), and Charms of Cynical Reason: The Transformations of the Trickster Trope in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011). Volumes, co-edited by him, include Dictionary of Literary Biography: Russian Writers Since 1980 (2003), anthologies of Russian and Soviet wondertales (2005) and Russian twentieth-century short stories (2011), Jolly Little Characters: Cult Heroes of the Soviet Childhood (2008), and Non-Canonical Classic: Dmitri A. Prigov (2010). Currently, Lipovetsky works on a critical biography of Dmitry Prigov and edits his collected works. Lipovetsky’s works were nominated for Russian Little Booker Prize (1997) and short-listed for the Andrey Bely Prize (2008).  In 2009-12, worked on the jury for Russian literary prize NOS (in 2011-12 as chair).

SONJA LUEHRMANN (Simon Fraser University) is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. She received her Ph.D. from the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan in 2009. Her research focuses on atheism, religion, and lived ideology during the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Her book, Secularism Soviet Style: Teaching Atheism and Religion in a Volga Republic (Indiana, 2011) connects archival research on late Soviet atheist propaganda with ethnographic fieldwork among post-Soviet religious activists in Marii El. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the methodological and epistemological problem of studying Soviet-era religious life through the unapologetically secularist perspective of official archival documents (under contract with Oxford University Press). Since 2010, ongoing ethnographic research on reproductive politics and Soviet memory has taken her to sites of Russian Orthodox anti-abortion activism in five Russian cities. With a group of collaborators funded through the SSRC, she is also involved in a comparative project looking at the sensory registers of prayer in Eastern Christian churches.

JULIANA MAXIM (University of San Diego) is an Associate Professor of art and architectural history at the University of San Diego in California. She completed her PhD dissertation in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture at M.I.T. in 2006. She writes on a range of architectural and aesthetic practices that relate to the cultural imagination of socialism.  She works on mass housing projects and the forms of modern urban life they generated, and on the architectural organization of leisure – from sea-side resorts to open-air museums.  She also extends considerations of architecture beyond buildings and architects, to representations in painting, photography, film, and writing.  She has published, for instance, on the propagandistic message that documentary photographs of architecture carried throughout the 1960s, and on the role that communist mass housing districts play in recent Romanian cinema; she is currently writing on socialist realist paintings that took housing districts as their subject matter. Maxim was a recipient of the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research Award (2008-2010) and was an American Council for Learned Societies post-doctoral fellow (2012-2013). Her forthcoming book titled The Socialist Life of Modern Architecture:  Bucharest, 1955-1965 (Routledge, 2016) explores the intense and multifaceted architectural activity in postwar Romania and the mechanisms through which architecture was invested with political meaning.

ALEKSANDR MERGOLD (Cornell University) is coming from a family with two generations of architects. He was trained at Princeton and Cornell University, receiving Master and Bachelor degrees in architecture, and the New York Chapter AIA Medal and the Charles Goodwin Sands Bronze Medal. After working for several large architecture firms, he joined the office of Pentagram in New York. There he worked on a variety of architectural and design projects, exhibitions, and cultural institutions. Aleksandr taught at Parsons the New School for Design and at Listaháskóli Íslands / Iceland Academy of the Arts in Reykjavik, and a lecturer at Design & Environmental Analysis, College of Human Ecology. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Cornell’s Department of Architecture, Aleksandr’s research is focused on a “design-and-adapt” modus operandi by repurposing all that is mundane, common, and, most important, available and disposable in today’s construction — be it objects, infrastructure, images, technology, or resources. Since 2008 he has been a partner at Austin+Mergold LLC, an architecture, landscape, and design practice, that is also testing ground for Aleksandr’s research agenda. Aleksandr’s work has been published in Mnemeio & Perivallon, 306090, BLDGBLOG, Specialle-Z, The Architect’s Newspaper, Domus, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Residential Architect Magazine, and the Cornell Journal of Architecture. Aleksandr Mergold is a Registered Architect in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey, member of the American Institute of Architects, American Institute of Graphic Arts, and is a LEED Accredited Professional. He is a winner of 2010 New York Architecture League Prize for Architects and Designers, the 2012 Philadelphia AIA Emergent Architect Prize and most recently the winner of Folly Competition at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, opening on May 11, 2014.

SERGUEI OUSHAKINE (Princeton University) is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. His research is concerned with transitional processes and situations: from the formation of newly independent national cultures after the collapse of the Soviet Union to post-traumatic identities and hybrid cultural forms. His first book The Patriotism of Despair: Loss, Nation, and War in Russia focused on communities of loss and exchanges of sacrifices in provincial post-communist Russia. His current project explores Eurasian postcoloniality as a means of affective reformatting of the past and as a form of retroactive victimhood. Oushakine’s Russian-language publications include edited volumes on trauma, family, gender and masculinity.

ELEANOR PEERS (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale) obtained her PhD from the Sociology Department at the University of Cambridge in 2010. This research concerned non-Russian perceptions of ethnicity, and their influence within post-Soviet Russian statehood. The project consisted of an analysis of regional newspaper discourse, from the Siberian Republics of Buryatia and Sakha (Yakutia). Her post-doctoral research has moved further into the arena of Social Anthropology, being concerned with the interrelated aesthetics and politics of contemporary Sakha shamanism. While at Cambridge, she guest-edited a special issue of the journal Inner Asia, on Buryatia. During her post-doctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology, she carried out extensive fieldwork in Sakha (Yakutia), while contributing to journals and edited volumes on East European Paganism, space and periphery in Russia, Soviet festival culture, history making in Inner Asia, East European rap, and post-Soviet lifestyle choice.

IVAN PESHKOV (Adam Mickiewicz University) is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Eastern Studies at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. His current research focuses on the political dimension of quasi-indigenousness on the Russian-Chinese frontier, the legacy of “frontier socialism” and urban memory in border areas.  He has conducted  field research in the Chinese, Russian, and Mongolian border triangle and investigated the main social and historical processes that characterize this area.

KEVIN M. F. PLATT (University of Pennsylvania) is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Graduate Chair of the Comparative Literature Program at University of Pennsylvania. He works on representations of Russian history, Russian historiography, history and memory in Russia, Russian lyric poetry, and global post-Soviet Russian culture. 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). 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.

THOMAS ROWLEY (University of Cambridge) is a PhD student in Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge. His dissertation explores the formation of dissident narratives about the late Soviet period. With particular attention to documentary film, poetry and memoir writing, the dissertation examines how intelligentsia groups sought to represent their experiences to wider publics during perestroika. He is also currently working on tracing samizdat flow in the Soviet Union as part of a joint Oxford-Memorial (Moscow) project entitled Reading Habits and Dissent.

GALINA RYLKOVA ( University of Florida) is an Associate Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Florida, Gainesville. She received her Ph. D. from the University of Toronto in Slavic Languages and Literatures. She is the author of The Archaeology of Anxiety: The Russian Silver Age and Its Legacy published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2007. Her current research interests include: Psychology of Creative Personality; Chekhov; Cultural Memory; Biography; and European Modernism. She is working on her second book, “Creative Lives: The Art of Being a Successful Russian Writer.”

JULIANE SCHICKER (The Pennsylvania State University)is a PhD candidate in the German Department at the Pennsylvania State University, working on her dissertation entitled: Local receptions of a Global Composer: Gustav Mahler and the Cultural Politics of the GDR. She received her teaching certification for Secondary Education (1. Staatsexamen) from the Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg (Germany) in German and English. Her state exam thesis Klassenfahrten und Interkulturelles Lernen (Class Trips and Intercultural Learning) was awarded with the “Joseph-Schmitt-Sonderpreis 2007.” She earned a Master in German from the Texas Tech University with a thesis about German Popliterature of the 1990s. She has published the article “Die Beeinflussung der Jugend durch den nationalsozialistischen Sprachstil” (“The impact of the National Socialist linguistic style on the youth”) (2011) that deals with linguistic and literary aspects of songs of the Hitler Youth. Her book chapter with the title “Beyond the Gewandhaus—Mahler in the GDR” is forthcoming this year in Kyle Frackman and Larson Powel’s Classical Music in the German Democratic Republic: Production and Reception. She co-authored a book chapter with Nick Henry titled “Heimatsehnsucht—Rammstein and the search for cultural identity” (2013) in John Littlejohn and Michael Putnam’s Rammstein on Fire: New Perspectives on the Music and Performances, and an article with Michael Putnam entitled “Straight Outta Marzahn: (Re)Constructing Collective Cultural Memory in East Germany”  (2014).

RAISA SIDENOVA  (Yale University) is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Media Studies and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her dissertation entitled From Pravda to Vérité: Soviet Documentary on Film and Television, 1953-1982 traces the changes and shifts that occurred in debates, institutions and individual careers that shaped the Soviet documentary film industry during late Socialism and argues that documentary cinema redefined itself as a cultural practice vis-à-vis the emergent genre of television documentary film. Raisa is a graduate of Moscow State University and also holds a Master’s degree in American Studies from Lehigh University, which she attended as a Fulbright scholar. She is currently based in London, UK, where she is a visiting researcher at UCL SSEES.

VICTORIA SMOLKIN-ROTHROCK (Wesleyan University) is an Assistant Professor of Russian History at Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut). She completed her Ph.D. at the University of California-Berkeley in 2010. Her recent publications include, “The Ticket to the Soviet Soul: Science, Religion and the Spiritual Crisis of Late Soviet Atheism,” in  Russian Review (2014) and “The Problem with the ‘Ordinary’ Soviet Death: Material and Spiritual in Atheist Cosmology,” in State, Religion and Society in Russia (2012). Smolkin-Rothrock’s forthcoming monograph is titled A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: Scientific Atheism, Socialist Rituals, and the Soviet Way of Life. Her research has been supported by Princeton University’s Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies; the Social Science Research Council Eurasia Post-Doctoral Research Award; the Sherman Emerging Scholar Lectureship; the American Council of Learned Societies Mellon Dissertation Fellowship; the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship in Religion and Ethics; and the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. Smolkin-Rothrock will be a Research Fellow at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC in 2014-2015.

OLIVER SUKROW (University of Heidelberg / Central Institute for Art History Munich) is a PhD candidate in Art History. He received his BA (2008) in Art History and Baltic Studies and his MA (2010) in Art History from the University of Greifswald, Germany. 2010-11 he was a research fellow at the University of Essex, Colchester, UK and worked 2011-12 as a curator for the exhibition Farewell to Icarus. Pictorial Worlds of the GDR – revised in Weimar, Germany. Since 2012 he is working at the Institute for European Art History of Heidelberg University on his dissertation project entitled Utopian Phenomena in the Visual Arts and Architecture of the GDR 1945-71. Currently, he holds a Baden-Württemberg-Scholarship for the Central Institute for Art History Munich. His latest publications include Josep Renau’s “Futuro Trabajador del Comunismo”: an Emblematic Work of the Era of the Scientific-Technical Revolution in the GDR (Arara, 11/2013) and papers on Heinrich Metzendorf. His main research areas are art in the GDR, mural painting in the 20th century, and art around 1900 in Germany.

SERGEY TOYMENTSEV (Rutgers University) is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature completing his dissertation on Deleuze and Russian Film: Transcendent Use of the Faculties on (post-) Totalitarian Screen (to be defended in May 2014). His other book-project tentatively titled Mnemonic Hybrids in a Hybrid Regime focuses on the memory politics in contemporary Russia in the context of the hybrid regime paradigm that explains paradoxes of post-Soviet memory in legal system, public opinion, memorial politics, television, film industry and literature. He has published articles and reviews on film (in Scope, Canadian Slavonic Studies, Film Criticism, French Studies, Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema and Kinokultura), memory studies (in Comparative Literature Studies and Ab Imperio) and literature and philosophy (in Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry, The AnaChronisT and Pynchon Studies).