I am an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Theater and Performance Studies at University of Chicago. My research, teaching, and art collaborations focus on the formation and collapse of the Soviet empire from the vantage point of the Caucasus and Central Asia. My book On the Threshold of Eurasia: Orientalism and Revolutionary Aesthetics in the Caucasus (Cornell 2018, winner of the CESS Book Prize) exposes how the idea of a revolutionary Eurasia informed the interplay between orientalist and anti-imperial discourses in Russian and Azeri poetry and prose. I coedited the special issue Crisis to Catastrophe: Lineages of the Global New Right with Aamir Mufti (boundary 2, 2023), which focuses on the Right’s attachment to crisis and catastrophe to justify its calls to return to “traditional” social and political structures that form the basis of a global white supremacist movement. I am currently coediting an anthology of anticolonial documents with Peter Kalliney and Harris Feinsod called Anticolonial Thought: An Anthology of Manifestos and Other Primary Documents, forthcoming with Oxford UP. My monograph in progress, Feeling Collapse, traces the political afterlives of internationalist feelings following the collapse of the Soviet multinational empire and how performance and video art staged alternative politics and publics.

My art collaborations include Azbuka Strikes Back: An Anticolonial ABCs, a co-authored book with collective Slavs and Tatars that explores the queer relations between phonemes and their alphabetic graphemes through the history of language and writing in the Soviet empire. I am also working on a collaborative curatorial project Costumes and Collapse about costumes and wearables in times of political and social transition with Slavs and Tatars and Hoda El Shakry.

My work has been supported by Fulbright, ACLS, and Humboldt Fellowships.

Photo by Jim Lüning