Graduate Group

Julia Alekseyeva

Assistant Professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies
Focus: Global media and radical politics, with a focus on the former USSR, Japan, and France. Author of the graphic novel Soviet Daughter and currently working on an academic monograph on global semi-documentary practices in the 1960s. 

Ivan Drpić

Associate Professor of History of Art

Focus: Visual and material cultures of Byzantium and the medieval Slavic world. Drpić is the author of the award-winning Epigram, Art, and Devotion in Later Byzantium.

Kristen R. Ghodsee

Professor of Russian and East European Studies (Other Affiliations: Graduate Group of Anthropology)

Focus: East European Ethnography, Women’s Activism, Marxism, Gender and Sexuality, Socialism and Postsocialism. Ghodsee is the author, most recently, of Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity During the Cold War and Taking Stock of Shock: Social Consequences of the 1989 Revolutions (with Mitchell A. Orenstein).

Michel Guillot

Professor of Sociology (Other affiliations: Population Studies Center)

Focus: Demography, public health, migration, Central Asia, Russia. Most recent articles: “Magnitude, demographics and dynamics of the impact of the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic on all-cause mortality in 21 industrialised countries,” Nature Medicine. “Adult mortality patterns in the former Soviet Union's "Southern Tier": Armenia and Georgia in comparative perspective,” Demographic Research

Kathryn Hellerstein

Professor of Germanic Languages (Other Affiliations: Ruth Meltzer Director of the Jewish Studies Program)

Focus: Yiddish literature, culture, and language; poetry, translation studies, gender studies, cinema, Jewish American literature and culture, Jews and China. Hellerstein is the author, most recently, of A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987 (2014) and the editor of Jews in China: Cultural Conversations, Changing Perceptions, Selected Essays of Irene Eber (2020).

Peter Holquist

Professor of History (Other Affiliations: History Graduate Group)

Focus: Nineteenth- and twentieth-century political history, history of war, international law, diplomatic history. Author of Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921, and presently working on book on imperial Russia and the development of the laws of war.

Jeffrey Kallberg

Professor of Music

Focus: Western art music from the late 18th to the mid 20th centuries, with a special emphasis on the music and cultural contexts of Chopin (the contexts including music in Poland and Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century). Author of Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre, and numerous essays on Chopin’s music.

D. Brian Kim

Assistant Professor of Russian and East European Studies

Focus: Russian literature, linguistic culture, and cultural and intellectual history before 1917. Currently writing a book about ideologies of universality and the teaching of language in late imperial Russia.

Benjamin Nathans

Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Associate Professor of History

Focus: Modern Russian and Soviet history, modern Jewish history, the history of human rights. Nathans is the author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia and is currently completing To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. His essays and articles have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the Journal of Modern History, and other venues.

Philip M. Nichols

Joseph Kolodny Professor of Social Responsibility in Business and Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics (Wharton)

Focus: Social and economic development, emerging economies, and corruption. Edited, most recently, The Transnationalization of Anticorruption Law (Routledge 2021, with Régis Bismuth and Jan Dunin-Wasowicz) and Thinking About Bribery: Neuroscience, Moral Cognition, and Psychology of Bribery (Cambridge 2017, with Diana Robertson 2017).

Mitchell Orenstein

Professor of Russian and East European Studies

Focus: Politics, Political Economy and International Relations of Europe and Eurasia. Author (with Hilary Appel) of From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Reforms in Postcommunist Countries (Cambridge, 2018) and The Lands in Between: Russia vs. the West and the New Politics of Hybrid War (Oxford 2019). His forthcoming book (with Kristen Ghodsee) is Taking Stock of Shock: Social Consequences of the 1989 Revolutions (Oxford 2021).

Adriana Petryna

Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Anthropology

Focus: sociocultural anthropology theory and methods; social studies of science and technology; environmental policy and climate change. Petryna is the author Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl and is completing a book on wildfires and emergency response.

 

Kevin M. F. Platt

Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Humanities

Focus: Russian literature, culture, history, cinema, poetry. Platt is the author, most recently, of Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths and the editor of Global Russian Cultures.

Rudra Sil

Professor of Political Science

Focus: Prof. Rudra Sil, Department of Political Science. Focus on: Russian & post-communist studies; theories & methods in comparative politics; international development; and labor Studies. Sil is author, coauthor or coeditor of seven books, including Managing 'Modernity': Work, Community and Authority in Late-Industrializing Japan and Russia. He is currently working on a book titled Russia Reconsidered: Fate of a Former Superpower.

Julia Verkholantsev

Associate Professor of Russian and East European Studies

Focus: cultural and intellectual history, medieval and early modern literary and linguistic culture in Central, Southeastern and Eastern Europe. Author of Ruthenica Bohemica: Ruthenian Translations from Czech in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poland and The Slavic Letters of St. Jerome: The History of the Legend and its Legacy or, How the Translator of the Vulgate Became an Apostle of the Slavs.

 

William Burke-White

Professor of Law

Focus: international law, international relations, human rights law, international investment law, international institutions, US foreign policy, Russian approaches to international law. Recent publications include: "Cities and Provinces in a World of States: Subnational Governments in the International Legal System" and "Crimea and the International Legal Order."