Research Statement

I am a cultural studies scholar whose work is informed by comparative literature, American studies, area studies, and gender studies. The unifying critical and pedagogical imperative across these fields concerns the transnational turn in the humanities, which challenged the centrality and homogeneity of the nation as a unit of cultural study. At stake now is connection, mobility, and hybridity, even as these three characteristics have also led to new forms of global surveillance, militarized borders, and police states. The transnational turn has resulted both in a fantasy of academic purification from state-funded scholarship, and an expanding effort to reevaluate cultural and social experience, simultaneously reaffirming and exposing scholarly investments in the nation in generative ways.

When my family emigrated to the United States, we left as enemies of the Soviet Union—as religious refugees, as wanderers. I chose to center my research and teaching on Boris Pasternak’s novel Doktor Zhivago because, to me, its fraught, polemical, and silenced past represents my personal evolution through my own hybrid identity. My personal experience greatly informs my scholarly identity, intellectual commitments, and pedagogical values, undergirding my affinity with cultural studies’ methods of transnational critique. I hold respect for students’ differences and abilities to be challenged, I am dedicated to equity in the classroom and beyond, and I prioritize collaboration in my pedagogy and research profile.

I have a personal stake in approaching cultural studies with a refusal to treat identities and borders—personal or national—as distinct, static, or coherent, and consequently to challenge literary canons and histories that are more representative of the legacies of imperial pasts than they are of the rich ethnic, racial, and gender diversity of authors and readers.

Future Research

I have begun work on a new research project that foregrounds my long-standing interest in transnational feminism, which was at the heart of my Master’s thesis on the 21st century Russian heterofamily. This project explores the potential for feminist and queer engagement with cults of personality and state authoritarianism in the contemporary moment of US and Russian transnational ethnonationalism. My first research from this project, “‘Anyone can be Pussy Riot:’ Exploring the Possibilities of Transnational Digital Feminism” is forthcoming in Feminist Formations. The article contributes to feminist analyses of ethnonationalism by tracing the complexity of the Russian performance group Pussy Riot’s strategies in the context of liberalism’s international decline. Additional work on this project will attend to the ways in which Russia’s anti-gay propaganda laws were adapted from US far right discourse, the role that US queer theory has played in the post-Cold War liberation movement in Russia, and how the 20th century Red Scares were reanimated during the Obama and Trump administrations. As with my book project, this research will rely on close reading as a method for understanding how historical, cultural, and political narratives actively shape the geopolitical formation of nations. 

Book Project

My book project, “Doktor Zhivago’s Cold War,” is both a reconsideration of the role of Pasternak’s novel in 20th century statecraft and a meditation on the way that Cold War Studies has understood the use of literature as a cultural weapon. The manuscript features an introduction, four chapters, and an epilogue. Chapter one focuses on the way scholars have been drawn into unproductive debates about complicity and resistance by reiterating a bipolar conception of the Cold War as an ideological struggle between capitalism and communism. My case study is George Orwell, the author of the most famous hot book, whose heroic reputation was upended when information emerged about his work with the British intelligence agency. By focusing on Orwell, I map contestations about the relationship between the author as a political actor and the political value of his literary work, detailing the way that Orwell’s work influenced both Pasternak and critical responses to Doktor Zhivago as well.

The three remaining chapters demonstrate my commitment to rethinking the Cold War as a global affair by focusing on geopolitical actors involved in Doktor Zhivago’s literary history. In chapter two, I follow the shift in rhetoric and action regarding Pasternak and his novel in the Soviet Union, focusing in particular on Nikita Khrushchev as Doktor Zhivago’s primary Soviet interpreter. My aim is to demonstrate how Pasternak’s novel politicized Soviet literature as a Cold War weapon during a crucial period of contestation within the Soviet empire over issues of national identity. Chapter three deepens the existing scholarly narrative of how the CIA found, understood, and distributed Doktor Zhivago. To do so, I use declassified CIA and US national security documents about Doktor Zhivago’s Russian-language global distribution in order to shift the attention of scholarship about Cold War literature from its simplification of books as fixed objects in the application of US foreign policy, and onto the significance of literary interpretation in the making of the US as a geopolitical entity.

Chapter four focuses on Doktor Zhivago’s first legitimate publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, an Italian communist who is too often a side note in critical dissections of Doktor Zhivago’s literary history.  In presenting Feltrinelli as a crucial interpreter of Doktor Zhivago, I explore his relation to Italy’s anti-fascist movement and the global entanglements of international socialism in the 1950s. In doing so, this chapter brings home my insistence on the limitations of a bipolar conception of the Cold War. Finally, the epilogue follows Doktor Zhivago’s life in the so-called post-Cold War period to study the novel’s changing fate in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. I look at the novel’s iterations in popular culture after the Cold War as a way to deliberate on the strange circular movement of the novel and its author and their ongoing influence. Taken as a whole, the book project emphasizes through the global travels of Doktor Zhivago the ways in which literature was at the center not only of Cold War cultural warfare, but also the significance of culture to 20th century state formations.