Organizing and Conferences
Grafting the Self
Annual Princeton Slavic Graduate Conference, 2017
Co-Organizer (with Gabriella Ferrari and Elizaveta Mankovskaya)
This three-day interdisciplinary conference explored instances of experimentation with individual and collective identity and the fashioning, refashioning, and manufacturing of subjectivity in the context of 20th- and 21st-century Eastern and Central Europe.
Kino Curio: Soviet and Russian Speculative Horror
Princeton Slavic Film Series, Fall 2015, Organizer
Kino Curio exposed viewers interested in Soviet and Russian film to horror and horror-adjacent films produced in the USSR and Russia, spanning nine decades from 1916 (The Queen of Spades) to 2006 (Ugly Swans). Restricted as horror was in the Soviet period, elements of horror still found their way into cinema in retellings of classics (Viy, 1967) and meditative science fiction films like Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972).
Laughing Matters: (Post)Soviet Comedy in Context
Princeton Slavic Film Series, Spring 2018, Co-organizer (with Charles Swank)
Laughing Matters introduced viewers to the wide-ranging, culturally embedded phenomenon of Soviet comedy, and its contexts and ramifications, especially in the resonant and productive decade of the 1970s. We featured beloved Soviet classics such as Ivan Vasilyevich Changes Professions (1973), tragicomedies designed with a moral message (Afonya, 1975), and later films which used comedy to puzzle through the implications of the fall of the Soviet empire (Peculiarities of the National Fishing, 1998). The series concluded with an anthology of short films, including an animated short about the complex work of film production (Film, Film, Film, 1968) and a PSA against improper behavior on the road (Traffic Light, 1970).
National Conference Presentations
"Uncertainty at the End of the World: Karen Shakhnazarov’s Gorod Zero and the Collapse of the Soviet Union” (ASEEES 2021 Virtual Conference)
"Gogol's Dead End: Dead Souls as the Culmination of a Horror Poetics" (AATSEEL 2021)
Discussant, "Environment and Contemporary Culture: Cinema Beyond the Anthropocene," ASEEES 2020
Discussant, "Memory, Trauma, Identity," ASEEES 2020
"Scaring the Critic: The Reception of Viy and Gogol's Apophatic Turn," AATSEEL 2020
"GuroGol and Gay Subjectivity in Gogol: The Beginning," ASEEES 2018
"Say My Name: Omission and Identity in Tsvetaeva's Molodets," ASEEES 2017
"The Terrible Glance: Interiority and Horror in Gogol's Ukrainian Stories," AATSEEL 2017
"Pelevin's Dreamscapes: Space and Confinement in Omon Ra," ASEEES 2015
Guest Lectures and Presentations
"HIV and Metaphor in the Age of PrEP" (Spring 2020); "HIV/AIDS: Disease, Stigma, Metaphor" (Spring 2018)
Literature and Medicine Course, Prof. Elena Fratto, Princeton
Seminars on Roadside Picnic and Stalker (Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Fall 2019)
American and Russian Science Fiction: Story-Worlds in Dialogue, Prof. Elena Fratto, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Fall 2018
Presentation of Stalker, Film Forum, University Center for Human Values, Princeton, 2017