Research Interests

My main research interest has been Vladimir Nabokov. My dissertation was about the uses of the classical tradition, the reception of Greek and Roman cultures in Russian interwar émigré literature. I studied the uses of Greek and Roman sexualities in the creation of modernist high art.

I am fascinated by the ways in which traditions subvert themselves in order to grow and expand. Nabokov’s legacy interests me from the point of view of liminality and adaptability, from the standpoint of reparative attitudes to loss of country, culture, and language.

My current research interests include: creative writing, queer theory, reparative knowledge and queer(ed) pedagogy, ethics of power, decolonization of Russian studies, Russian émigré/immigrant culture, classical antiquity, intercultural competence and communication ethics, private and social aspects of queerness and gender-non-conformity, literary genealogies, comparative literature, contemporary Russian art and media.

I am a co-editor, with José Vergara, of a collective volume Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century (Open Access, Amherst College Press, 2022). As a contributor to the volume, I write about reparative knowledge and the role of academic discussion and creative assignments in intercommunal repair.

My article about Nabokov’s theory of literary evolution (Slavic and Eastern European Journal 67.1, Spring 2023, pp. 46-65) deals with the writer’s life-long strategies of “conceptual survival” in relation to such ideological environments as Russian Formalism, Marxism, and academic literary studies in the U.S.

In an article on Nabokov’s early experiments with Russian hexameters (International Journal of the Classical Tradition 27.1, March 2020, pp. 89-111), I analyze his published and unpublished hexametric poems and argue that as a young poet Nabokov was seeking ways to individualize the classical tradition.

I am currently working on a project provisionally titled Queer Nabokov, where I look at Nabokov’s vocabulary of difference, in English and in Russian. The Slavic Literature Pod published my short introduction into the topic in September 2023.

In Russian, I self-published an article on the reception of praemeditatio malorum in Pushkin’s poetry on my page on Academia.edu. My Russian crib of Sappho’s Second Ode, with my preface and short commentary, has been the most popular scholarly text I’ve published on Academia.edu.

In graduate school, I kept a blog where I published short excerpts from my daily Greek and Latin readings with my Russian translation and commentary (and an occasional Russian poem).

Teaching

In Fall 2024, I am teaching a course on the History of Russian Culture, with emphasis on alternative perspectives on Russian national myths; Advanced Readings in Russian Literature; and a course on Vladimir Nabokov.