Yale Slavic Languages and Literatures

06/19/2025

We wanted to share the wonderful news that Katerina Clark has been awarded a Laura Shannon Prize Silver Medal for her last book, Eurasia without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons (Harvard UP, 2021). The prize was announced a day after her passing, sadly, but we can continue to take comfort and pride in her towering achievements and impact.

"Deeply researched and expertly written, Katerina Clark’s ‘Eurasia without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons 1919-1943’ is a path-breaking study of the Soviet ambition to create an international ‘leftist literary commons.’ Clark invites us to reimagine the territory of Modernist ‘world literature’ as she also raises significant questions about the political aims and consequences of literary forms. Russia’s turn to the East, with its mandate that Moscow remain the ‘center,’ here stands in dramatic contrast to the Paris and Berlin-located models of global republics of letters that have dominated Modernist studies. Clark narrates the ways earlier tenets of socialist realism were replaced by a broader set of aesthetic possibilities as the aim of anti-imperialism gave way to anti-fascism. In doing so, she enriches our sense of how an obligation to the representation of proletarian life famously came into tension with the formal ambitions of the radical avant-garde. She traces the complex networks and reciprocal relationships between internationalist literary figures as they promoted a left agenda, forging new audiences of South and East Asian, Soviet, and European readers. Throughout, Clark offers detailed and fully contextualized accounts of individual artists and individual works. To be cosmopolitan in this world meant not so much to take an urbane and high culture viewpoint, but to become familiar with, and represent, the worlds of the working class wherever they were found. With ‘Eurasia without Borders,’ Katerina Clark truly redraws the map of twentieth-century comparative literature.”

The Laura Shannon Prize, one of the preeminent prizes for European studies, is awarded each year to the best book that transcends a focus on any one country, state, or people to stimulate new ways of thinking about contemporary Europe as a whole. Read more about the prize and its recipients here: https://nanovic.nd.edu/news/nanovic-institute-awards-the-2024-laura-shannon-prize-to-ukrainian-studies-scholar-rory-finnin-for-book-on-poetics-of-solidarity-in-the-black-sea-region/

06/04/2025

Faculty research spotlight: Congratulations to Professor Claire Roosien on her latest publication! Her article "The Musical Teahouse: Yalla and the 'East' as Performance in Soviet Popular Culture" appears in Volume 83, Issue 4 of Slavic Review, now available through Cambridge Core.

This article examines the “East” as a performance practice in late Soviet culture through the case study of Yalla, arguably the most popular Central Asian band of the 1970s and 1980s and a hit performer across the entire socialist bloc and the Global South. It argues, first, that Yalla’s performance of the East changed over time, from the band’s origins in the Beatlemania of the early 1970s to the perestroika moment of nascent marketization; and, second, that the East functioned as an ambiguous category that evoked multiple resonances to multiple audiences and lent itself to a range of different political projects. Roosien concludes that Yalla’s performance of the East cannot be fully understood outside the material circumstances in which the band worked and the political world in which they functioned.

Read the full issue, including the critical forum on "Empire and Decolonization," at Cambridge Core: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/slavic-review/issue/250E719C27210BF45B88BB702950031A

05/23/2025

Interested in video games? Consider joining one of the Whitney Humanities Center working groups run by the members of our department.

Dismissed, mocked, feared or loved for decades, video games have become a staple of contemporary media, art, and popular culture, studied alongside traditional print media and film. They eclipse the global yearly revenue of both film and music industries combined, leaving their financial significance undeniable. What remains understudied, however, is the political and cultural significance of the medium. The Working Group in Video Game Studies offers a collaborative space for the intellectual and playful exploration of video games as aesthetic, technological, cultural, and political objects.

Several questions animate the founding of this working group: Why do video games matter? How do players “perform” various identities in games, and how might they resist or subvert expected performances? What themes and ideas are revealed uniquely, effectively, inadequately through the medium of video games? What are the political implications for the ideologies present in a video game given the globalized position of the medium? How do video games exist as one part of a much broader media and technology ecosystem, including their imbrication in the (post-)Cold War military-industrial-entertainment complex?

Video games must be studied as both crucially important technological and cultural objects, and we hope that this working group will mark only the start of more sustained efforts to take video games seriously at Yale and beyond.

https://whc.yale.edu/programs/working-groups/video-game-studies

05/21/2025

Graduate research spotlight: Earlier this year, our PhD candidate Liliya Dashevski published a piece on the website of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was previously a Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of Drawings and Prints.

In this article, Liliya takes a closer look at the historic paper dolls from the Met's Drawings and Prints collection and traces the story of conspicuous consumption and evolving social values.

Read Liliya's contribution below!

Historic paper dolls from the Drawings and Prints collection tell a story of conspicuous consumption and evolving social values.

05/15/2025

Did you know our department is also on Instagram? We invite you to follow our account for an additional way to stay informed about our work.

On our Instagram page, we share departmental news, provide updates on upcoming events, and highlight academic achievements of our students, faculty, and staff. We look forward to connecting with our community through this additional platform!

https://www.instagram.com/yaleslavic/

05/14/2025

More exciting news about our PhD program graduates! Please join us in congratulating Liana Battsaligova, who has recently accepted the position of tenure-track Assistant Professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Oberlin College.

Liana submitted her dissertation, "Russian Beauty: National Art and Literature After the Soviet Union," in March 2025. Her teaching and research focus is on late- and post-Soviet literature and avant-gardes. She has also previously taught at Reed, Grinnell, Pomona, Middlebury, and Yale.

Warmest congratulations, Liana!

05/12/2025

Faculty research spotlight: Prof. Nari Shelekpayev has recently published an article entitled "Thinking beyond Soviet Teleologies: Perspectives for the Study of Central Asia" in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History (Volume 26, Number 1, Winter 2025).

The article "briefly outlines the evolution of the historiography of
Soviet Central Asia since the early 1990s, highlighting its sources of inspiration and interpretative frameworks to elucidate how they have contributed to, or detracted from, a more nuanced and critical understanding of the region’s past" and "provides an overview of recent debates surrounding what has been referred to as a “decolonial turn” in Central Asian studies." Finally, the article "explores the potential for applying global, transnational,
and comparative approaches to the study of the region over the past century."

Shelekpayev proposes a framework that would "enable one to rethink processes and agencies in ways that bypass or question the sense of purpose inherent in prevailing methodological nationalisms, epistemic and moral regimes, as well as ever-evolving ideological and disciplinary contexts in relation to some aspects of Soviet Central Asian history."

Nari Shelekpayev is Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, specializing in the urban and cultural history of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet states. His scholarly work has been published in Slavic Review, Ab Imperio, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Europe-Asia Studies, Urban History, Planning Perspectives, and others.

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05/09/2025

More joyful news as we wrap up this academic year. Our PhD Candidate, Alana Felton, will start her position as Assistant Director of College Writing at Pomona College in Fall 2025. Please join us in congratulating her on this exciting new position!

At Pomona, Alana will direct the Center for Speaking, Writing, and the Image (CSWIM). She will mentor CSWIM Writing Partners, lead writing workshops for students, teach writing courses, and guide college-wide discussions on writing pedagogy. Alana brings extensive experience to this role. Throughout her studies at Yale, she has worked as a writing tutor for Yale undergraduates as a Writing Partner and as a Graduate Writing Fellow at the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning. She also has experience working in academic publishing.

Alana's research focuses on contemporary Belarusian literature, culture, and political art. Most recently, she was awarded a Fulbright Schuman Open Research Grant to conduct dissertation research in the EU during the 2024–2025 academic year.

Warmest congratulations, Alana!

05/07/2025

Yale News spotlights Prof. Jinyi Chu discussing his new book on how Chinese aesthetics shaped Russian Modernist movements.

"The book’s content is about late 19th-century, early 20th-century Russian culture’s encounter with Chinese culture. Or what they understand as Chinese. In this encounter with something unfamiliar to them, together with culture from other parts of the world, the worldviews of Russian writers, artists, and philosophers — like other European artists, writers, and philosophers — are reshaped by this new exposure to the newly accessible world culture. And that revises the ways in which they imagine what art should be, what poetry should be, what the universal understanding of many concepts should be. "

Read the full article here:

05/05/2025

Congratulations are in order to Lexi Dalrymple, our Russian and Eastern Eurasian Studies major, for her senior essay, which has been awarded the Scott Book Prize!

Her essay, Spartacus at the Bolshoi: A Military Ballet in a Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, was supervised by Prof. Marijeta Bozovic and investigated the history of the ballet Spartacus and why there has been a return to Spartacus and Yuri Grigorovich’s Soviet aesthetic since 2013 and if the meaning morphed since its original inception in 1968. The Soviet Union has collapsed, yet some of its cultural legacies remain strong, especially in ballet. By examining the context surrounding the creation of the project, the form of the ballet, and the Bolshoi’s artistic stagnation following its creation, the essay argued that the work serves to glamorize a particular kind of militaristic and oppositional Soviet nostalgia, especially in a time of war, and dove into the what the work represents in a post-2022 world.

After years of training intensely in the Vaganova method, including spending two summers in Saint Petersburg to train with the instructors from the academy, Lexi had always been very attuned with the world of Russian ballet. Lexi has also been intrigued in the complexity of the connection between the state and art in the Soviet Union and now in the Russian Federation, and Spartacus in particular caught her attention due to its lack of subtlety and the fact that one of her friends who was training at the Bolshoi in 2022 mentioned seeing a performance of the ballet just a few days before the invasion.

Lexi was also awarded the Paul H. And Brigette P. Fry Cup from Ezra Stiles College for contributions to the arts in the college and will be attending University of Michigan next fall for law school. Congratulations, Lexi!

05/02/2025

Please join us in celebrating our PhD alumna Mina Magda, who has recently accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, beginning Fall 2025.

Mina is currently an Assistant Professor (non-tenure track) in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan and Postdoctoral Scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows. The new appointment marks Mina's return to NYU, where she was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia.

At NYU, Mina will teach courses on black radical politics and cultural production such as The New Soviet Man and the New Negro, Black (Dis)locations: Race Travelers and the Soviet Union, and Black Women in Revolt. Her current book project focuses on black diasporic visual and media histories in Imperial Russia, Soviet Russia, and Post-Soviet Russia. Her forthcoming article, “The Russian Image of the Black: On Matters of Race and Perspective,” will be published in Slavic Review later this year.

Warmest congratulations, Mina!

05/01/2025

Explore Ukrainian culture in the Fall semester with Yale’s Ukrainian Program, which offers both language and culture courses.

Students learn Ukrainian while creating traditional art, exploring pop and traditional culture, and diving into films from the 1920s to today. Classes use VR tech and hands-on workshops to make learning come alive. For the Cinematic Ukraine course, no previous knowledge of Ukrainian language is required.

Plus, join a community that extends beyond campus with NYC trips and various events on campus.

For more information, contact [email protected]