Sergei Antonov holds a Ph.D. from Columbia (2011) and a J.D. from NYU Law (2002). His first book, Bankrupts and Usurers of Imperial Russia: Debt, Property, and the Law in the Age of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, appeared from Harvard University Press in 2016. His current research focuses on Russian serfdom as a legal regime, as well as on crime and capitalism in late imperial Russia. He has taught at Queens College CUNY and at Columbia University. In the fall 2017 he will join the Department of History at Yale University as an Assistant Professor.
Natalija Arlauskaite – is Professor at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science of Vilnius University, where she studies literary, film, and visual media. Her current academic interests include visual theory, forms of historical imagination, documentary images of war atrocities in film and arts. She is the author of Analysis of Hermetic Text: Structure of Semantic Space in Works by Velimir Khlebnikov (2005), Key-Concepts of Feminist Film Theory (2010), Native and Foreign Canons: Film Adaptations between Narrative Theory and Cultural Studies (2014). Also, she is the editor-in-chief of the book series “Writings on Film” (published by Mintis), and a translator of the writings of Yuri Tynyanov and Sergei Eisenstein into Lithuanian.
Itai Apter is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Haifa. Itai engages in academic research focusing on matters ranging from the history of international law to international criminal law and interactions between international law, international relations and international politics. He holds LL.B. 2006 (University of Haifa) and LL.M. in International Legal Studies 2008 (New York University).
Artem Bagiev is an independent scholar. He holds MS in Journalism and Mass Communication from The University of Kansas (2012). His master thesis explored the depiction of Russian-Iranian arms and nuclear trade in The New York Times. Since 2006, Bagiev has been working in the video production industry. As an intern, he did editorial job for Al-Jazeera English in Washington DC; he also worked as a full-time editor at RT in Moscow. Currently, Bagiev runs his own small production business ZenVisuals, which mostly makes corporate videos for customers such as Burger King Russia and AGC Glass Europe. As a video producer, he also works for sputniknews.com. His research interests include propaganda, public relations and international affairs.
Vadim Bass is architectural historian and critic. He teaches at the European University at St Petersburg (Department of Art History). He 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).
Polina Barskova received her BA from St. Petersburg State University in Classics for diploma on Catullus, and her MA and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley where she arrived in 1998 and studied cultural history of Petrograd-Leningrad. Her scholarly publications include articles on Nabokov, Bakhtin brothers, early Soviet film, and, lately, on culture of the besieged Leningrad. Now Barskova lives in Amherst (MA) with her daughter Frosia where she is teaching Russian literature at Hampshire College and working on a project The Ruin Screams: Culture in the Besieged Leningrad (1941-44).” She published her first book of poetry Christmas in 1991; at the moment her ninth book of poetry is in print in Riga. In 2015, Barskova was awarded the Andrey Bely Prize for her book of prose “Living Pictures.”
Simon Bell was educated at Reading University and trained at Guildford School of Acting, with a PhD on the work of Laibach and the NSK, from Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. Since 1993, he has been a freelance theater practitioner and director of over 140 theater productions. He is a co-founder of the Regenerator Theatre Company and a Resident Director of the Theatre of the Wheel. He has been the associate director of the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival for the past 21 years.
Aleksandar Bošković is a Lecturer in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University, where he teaches courses on Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cinema and literature, as well as on the intersection of literature and visual culture in Slavic avant-gardes. He has published essays on issues of digital mnemonics, Yugonostalgia and cultural memory, avant-garde photobooks, Serbian poetry and post-Yugoslav fiction, history of European Küntstlerroman, and the theory of possible worlds. He is the author of The Poetic Humor in Vasko Popa’s Oeuvre (Institute for Literature and Art in Belgrade, 2008) and a co-editor (with Tatjana Aleksić) of Mediated Resistance: The Struggle of Independent Mediascapes During the Yugoslav Dissolution (Brill, 2017). He is currently working on several projects, including the anthology of Yugoslav modernism and the book manuscript, Slavic Avant-Garde Cinepoetry, a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exploration of photopoetry and bioscopic books within Slavic avant-gardes.
Dmitry Bykov graduated from the Moscow State University. As a journalist, he worked in Sobesednik, Stolitsa weekly, Ogonyok and Novaia Gazeta. He taught at the Moscow State University, the Moscow Academy of International Relations, Princeton University and UCLA. He authored more than fifty books of poetry, essays, and fiction, among which are biographies of Boris Pasternak, Bulat Okudjava and Vladimir Mayakovsky.
Marilyn Campeau is a PhD candidate in the Department of History and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto (under the supervision of Dr. Lynne Viola). Her dissertation investigates the visual experience of Soviet combatants during WWII through an examination of frontline drawings as well as war photographs and caricatures. Her research interests are at the junction of the history of everyday life, war and violence, propaganda, and visual culture.
Ross Caputi is a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts in the History Department. He is the co-founder of the Islah Reparations Project, a non profit organization. And he is the director of the documentary film Fear Not the Path of Truth: a Veteran’s Journey after Fallujah (2013).
Lauren Coyle is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersections of legal and political anthropology, critical theory, historical ethnography, epistemology, spirituality, subjectivity, psychoanalysis, capitalism, and symbolic power. Her geographical focus is on Ghana and, more broadly, on Africa at large. She received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Coyle is currently working on a book titled Fires of Gold: Law, Land, and Sacrificial Labor in Ghana, an ethnography of the often hidden violence and cultural transformation in the penumbra of Ghana’s gold mining – a signal sovereign dilemma and “poisoned chalice” for postcolonial Africa. She is also at work on a second book titled Law in Light: Truth, Temporality, and Ritual Power in Africa, a comparative anthropological study of the experiential and philosophical dimensions of ritual subjectivity and veracity.
Wim Coudenys teaches Russian and European (cultural) history at the University of Leuven and is chairman of the Belgian Association of Slavists. He specializes in the history of the relations between Russia and the West, the Russian emigration and Russian historiography. He published a biography of the prolific Russian émigré author Ivan Nazhivin (Onedelachtbaren!, 1999), a history of the Russian emigration in Belgium (Leven voor de tsaar, 2004) and an ‘alternative’ history of Russia (Het geheugen van Rusland, 2014). He has also done research on the role of translation in the emergence of Russian history in the 18th century. His latest book, on the relations between Belgium and Russia during WWI, came out in March 2017 (Voor Vorst, voor Vrijheid en voor Recht. Kolonel Andrej Prezjbjano, een Rus aan het IJzerfront).
Predrag Dojčinović has been working in the research section of the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia since 1998. He has authored numerous articles and has edited several volumes on the social, political, cultural and legal aspects of the international armed conflicts, including Propaganda, War Crimes Trials and International Law: From Speakers Corner to War Crimes (Routledge 2012). Dojčinović has lectured widely in Europe and the United States, was the Gladstein Visiting Professor of Human Rights at the University of Connecticut in 2014, and currently holds the position of Adjunct Professor at the University of Connecticut.
Elena Fratto is an assistant professor in Princeton’s department of Slavic languages and literatures. Her work lies at the intersection between theories of narrative and the history of science (especially late 19th- and early 20th-century astronomy and medicine). She has published on Eikhenbaum’s post-Formalist production, star observation and literary inscriptions, narrative time and the thyroid, and the Kitsch aesthetics in post-Soviet Russia. Her book manuscript, titled Medical Story-Worlds, addresses the narrative structure of medical knowledge in the decades 1880-1930 in Russia, Italy, and France.
Alexey Golubev is a Banting Postdoctoral Scholar at the History Department, University of Toronto. He is joining the History Department at the University of Houston as an Assistant Professor of Russian History and Digital Humanities in the fall 2017.
Jochen Hellbeck is Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and the author of, most recently, Stalingrad: the City that Defeated the Third Reich. New York: PublicAffairs, 2015. He is currently preparing a book on the first Soviet testimonies of Nazi German occupation during World War II.
Jordan Kiper is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology with graduate certificates in human rights and cognitive science at the University of Connecticut. He holds an MA in philosophy from Colorado State University and BAs in anthropology, art history, and philosophy from Colorado University. Kiper has authored over 20 articles and book chapters including a forthcoming book co-edited with Susie DiVietro entitled Perspectives on Forgiveness: Contrasting Approaches to Concepts of Forgiveness and Revenge. His research interests include propaganda and violence. His regional area of interest is the Balkans, where he has done extensive multi-sited fieldwork with exfighters and survivors the Yugoslav Wars.
Matthew Kovac is a journalist and researcher from Chicago. Prior to joining a Michigan-based government watchdog group, Matt investigated wrongful convictions with the Chicago Innocence Center and covered race and poverty issues for The Chicago Reporter magazine. Matt’s work has been featured by AlterNet, Antiwar.com, Common Dreams, and Truthout. The Society of Professional Journalists named him a National Finalist for its 2013 Mark of Excellence Award in Online Opinion and Commentary. Matt graduated from Northwestern University, where he studied journalism and history and served as editor-in-chief of The Protest magazine.
Andrew Kuech is a PhD Candidate in Politics and Historical Studies at the New School for Social Research. His current dissertation project, Imagining “America” in the Development of Communist and Nationalist China, 1949-1965 examines the role and uses of imagery of the United States within the rival state propaganda campaigns of the PRC and ROC during the 1950s and 1960s. He spent last year living and doing research in Shanghai as a Fulbright Fellowship recipient.
Alaina Lemon is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan (PhD in Anthropology University of Chicago, 1996). Most relevant to this conference on violence and propaganda is her piece, “Dealing emotional blows: realism and verbal terror at the Russian State Theatrical Academy,” Language and Communication (2004). Her first book, Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani Memory from Pushkin to Post-Socialism (Duke, 2000) combines ethnographic with archival work to explore the racializing ironies and obstacles that stage performance poses in the lives of Roma. The companion documentary film, in Romani and Russian, T’an Bakhtale (1996 DER) is available for streaming from Alexander Street. Recent publications include “MetroDogs: the Heart in the Machine,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2015); “Touching the Gap: Social Qualia and Cold War Contact,” Anthropological Theory (2013); and “The Emotional Lives of Moscow Things,” Russian History (2009). These works focus on sentiment and sensation, tracing lines from seeming minutiae (signs and materials in interactions and performances) to institutions and infrastructures. A forthcoming book, Technologies for Intuition (forthcoming University of California, 2017) juxtaposes anxieties about mental influence to dreams of utopian mental communion, linking Cold War-era theatrical practice with spectacular demonstrations of telepathy science, to explore the ways in which histories of geopolitical conflict have affected our everyday and academic theories of communication and contact.
Alice Lovejoy is a film, media, and cultural historian, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and the Moving Image Studies Program at the University of Minnesota. Her book, Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military (Indiana University Press, 2015), was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2016 University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies. She is currently at work on two book projects: one examining exile and the war economy of cinema during World War II; the other exploring the intertwined histories of a series of children’s television and film institutions during the Cold War.
Matthew Luxmoore is a British-Polish journalist focusing on Russia and Eastern Europe. He grew up in Warsaw and is fluent in German, Russian and Polish, having studied at the universities of Moscow and Heidelberg. After covering the Ukraine crisis from Kyiv and Donetsk in 2014, he traveled the region as a freelance correspondent for Al Jazeera, reporting among others on the plight of Georgia’s internally displaced, life in newly annexed Crimea, tensions in the Moldovan breakaway state of Transnistria and Orthodox Church influence in Siberia. As a Harvard graduate student, he traveled to Moscow, Crimea and Ukraine in summer 2016 to interview the leaders and ideologues of pro-Russian “counter-revolutionary” groups and Kremlin-sponsored nationalist movements about their use of WWII symbolism.
Erina Megowan is a postdoctoral fellow at the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and its Consequences at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. She received her PhD in History from Georgetown University in 2016, where her dissertation analyzed the evacuation of Soviet writers, theater and opera companies, film studios and art museums to the Urals, Siberia and Central Asia during World War II. She is currently working on a book manuscript examining the Soviet creative intelligentsia’s role in the waging of total war.
Alister Miskimmon is Professor of European Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. He works on strategic narratives, German foreign policy and European security. Alister is part of an EU-funded Jean Monnet Network (2015-2018) conducting research on EU crisis narratives in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine. Alister’s other current project is on British and Polish defense policy after the 2016 NATO summit in Warsaw, funded by the Noble Foundation. Alister, Ben O’Loughlin, and Laura Roselle have published two books on strategic narratives – Strategic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order (New York, Routledge, 2013) and Forging the World: Strategic Narratives and International Relations (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2017). Alister will be taking up the position of Head of the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University, Belfast in June 2017.
Peggy O’Donnell received her Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016, and is currently the Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Atrocity Studies at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. Her doctoral work focused on mass grave exhumations and on the forensic scientists who opened graves to reconstruct historical and legal narratives of atrocity. Her current research interests build on that foundation, and consider rights in the broadest sense, such as those of women, of minorities, and of the various parties in war, as well as rights in the wake of accidents and natural disasters. In fall 2017, she will join the Pozen Center for Human Rights at the University of Chicago as the Postdoctoral Fellow in Human Rights.
Ben O’Loughlin is Professor of International Relations and Co-Director of the New Political Communication Unit at Royal Holloway, University of London. Ben holds degrees from the University of Northumbria at Newcastle (BA), University of Warwick (MA) and the University of Oxford (MSc, DPhil). He is co-editor of the Sage journal Media, War & Conflict. His books include Radicalisation and Media: Terrorism and Connectivity in the New Media Ecology (Routledge, 2011), War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War (Polity, 2010) and Television and Terror: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse (Palgrave, 2007/09). His projects on media and international security have been funded by the British Council, European Commission, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Technology Strategy Board (TSB), and the UK’s Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI).
Serguei Oushakine teaches in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Slavic languages and literatures. He is the author of The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia. Together with Alexey Golubev, he recently co-edited a volume of war correspondence The Twentieth Century: Letters of War (XX vek: pis’ma voiny). Since 2011, he directs the Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Princeton.
Katherine M. H. Reischl is Assistant Professor in the Slavic Department at Princeton University. Her research focuses primarily on twentieth-century Russian literature, art, and culture, with particular attention paid to the relationship between text and image. Her first book project, Photographic Literacy, centers on the work of Russian author-photographers including Leonid Andreev, Mikhail Prishvin, Sergei Tret’iakov, Il’ia Il’f, and Il’ia Ehrenburg. She is a co-organizer for the Pedagogy of Images project at Princeton, which seeks to develop new approaches to the visual language of Soviet children’s books.
Linda Robertson is on the faculty of the Media and Society Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Her degree (U of Oregon, 1976) is in the history of science and its influence on Elizabethan drama. Finding that the academic world in the 1980s had a surplus of professors who taught Shakespeare, she became the Director of Composition at Wichita State University, published a textbook on writing-across-the-curriculum, Discovery: Reading, Writing, and Thinking in the Academic Disciplines (1988) and moved to Geneva, New York. After establishing the Writing and Rhetoric Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she was the prime mover in establishing the first Media and Society program at an American 4-year liberal arts college (1996). Her scholarship includes publications on the rhetoric of economics (with William Waller, jr), the representation of warfare (Persian Gulf War), the study of American representation of air power in World War I, The Dream of Civilized Warfare: World War I Flying Aces and the American Imagination (2003), and, most recently, the German representation of the Allied bombing campaign. Her documentary film, Daughters of the New Republic: Harriet Tubman and Sarah Bradford, will be available online through Alexander Street in May, 2017.
Varvara Sklez is a research fellow in the School of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration and a lecturer in the Moscow School of Social and Economic Science. She holds MA in Cultural Studies from the Russian State University for the Humanities and MA (Distinction) in Public History from the University of Manchester (obtained in the Moscow School of Social and Economic Science). Her current research focuses on history representations in contemporary Russian documentary theatre. Her articles on the issues of Jerzy Grotowski’s theatre documentation and public history in Russia (co-authored) will soon appear in the New Literary Observer and NZ: Debates on Politics and Culture. Being one of the Public History Lab founders, she has co-organized a conference Past is Another Country? Public History in Russia in 2016, and is now co-organizing another conference Public History in Russia: Museums for the Past or the Past for Museums?, which will take place on June, 15-17, 2017 at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. Sklez participatеs in the activities of The Theatrum Mundi Theatre Research Lab, and (among other matters) works as the contributing editor for the Lab’s website .
Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, part of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She studied at University of Ljubljana (Faculty of Social Sciences). Her dissertation “Public Narratives of the Past in the Framework of Transitional Justice Processes: The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina” was awarded the 2015 Jean Blondel PhD Prize for the best thesis in politics issued by the European Consortium for Political Research.
Tamara Pavasović Trošt is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Harvard University (2012), with a dissertation examining the use of history in the construction of ethnic identity narratives in youth in Serbia and Croatia. She is interested in issues of ethnic identity, collective memory, political socialization, and youth, with a methodological focus on qualitative methods. She is currently studying the relationship between class and ethnic exclusivism in the Balkans, as well as local understandings of “Europe” and their obstacle to the progression of LGBT rights in Southeast Europe.
Éva Tulipán is a research historian at the Institute and Museum of Military History, Budapest, with a focus on Hungarian history after 1945. Her research interests include ideology, propaganda and memory politics of the communist era, concerning the 1956 revolution and its human and military casualties, as well as material traces of the postwar period in the urban environment. She received her PhD in history at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University in 2010; her thesis was written on the Republic Square siege of the Budapest party building in 1956. She authored two books and co-authored two volumes on the civil and military casualties of the 1956 revolution.
Emily Van Buskirk is associate professor in the department of Germanic, Russian, and East European Literatures at Rutgers University. She specializes in Russian twentieth-century literature (particularly in-between genres), and is also interested in Czech literature. She coedited (with Andrei Zorin) Lydia Ginzburg’s Alternative Literary Identities (2012) and a Russian edition of Ginzburg’s blockade prose (2011); she edited Ginzburg’s Notes from the Blockade for Random House, Vintage Classics (2016). Her book Lydia Ginzburg’s Prose: Reality in Search of Literature came out with Princeton University Press in 2016.
Ilya Vinitsky is Professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Princeton University. His main fields of expertise are Russian Romanticism and Realism, the history of emotions, and nineteenth-century intellectual history. Vinitsky is author of Ghostly Paradoxes: Modern Spiritualism and Russian Culture in the Age of Realism (University of Toronto Press, 2009), Vasily Zhukovsky’s Romanticism and the Emotional History of Russia (Northwestern University Press, 2015), Count of Sardinia: Dmitry Khvostov and Russian Culture (New Literaey Observer, 2017) and co-author of Cultural History of Russian Literature (Polity Press, 2009; with Andrew Baruch Wachtel). His current projects include a “cultural psychography” of a Russian man of fortune Ivan Narodny and “the history of tears” in Russian literature.
Richard Ashby Wilson is the Gladstein Distinguished Chair of Human Rights and Professor of Law and Anthropology at UConn Law School, and founding director of the Human Rights Institute at UConn. Wilson is the author or editor of ten books on international human rights and post-conflict justice institutions such as truth and reconciliation commissions and international criminal tribunals. His forthcoming book Incitement On Trial: Prosecuting International Speech crimes (Cambridge University Press, 2017), combines law and empirical social research to understand recent efforts by international courts to prosecute political leaders for inciting genocide and instigating war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Agata Zborowska is a PhD candidate at the Department of Film and Visual Culture, University of Warsaw. Her research interests lay in the intersection of material culture, visual studies, critical theory, and cultural history. Agata is the lead researcher of the project The Life of Things in Post-war Poland (1944-1949). Practices and images granted by the Polish National Science Center. She has been visiting scholar at Indiana University Bloomington (2016), University College London (2014), and Carleton University, Ottawa (2011).