Russian and East European Studies
Lecturer
PhD, Yale University (Slavic Languages and Literatures, 2024)
Spencer Small is a scholar of Soviet and Post-Soviet literature, culture, and digital media. He earned his PhD from Yale University in Slavic Languages and Literatures. His research investigates the relationships between narrative, art, and politics. Spencer is a Lecturer in Penn’s Department of Russian and East European Studies and is working on his book manuscript, The Ethical Pact in Russophone Wartime Writing. His project combines literary analysis with narrative ethics to develop the ethical pact as an original theoretical tool of narratology to study the intersections of ethics and cultural expression through first-person Russophone wartime narratives of the 20th and 21st centuries. Before joining the Russian and East European Studies Department at Penn, Spencer worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn’s Wolf Humanities Center.
Work experience:
Lecturer, Yale University (2024-2025)
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania (2025-2026)
Office Hours
Research Interests
20th- and 21st-century Russophone literature and culture, representations of war in literature, narrative ethics and first-person narratives, video games and visual narratives, Russian and Soviet film
Selected Publications
Review of The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War by Shay A. Pilnik. Slavic and East European Journal 70, no. 1 (2026).
Courses Taught
Fall 2026 Courses:
REES 0131: Putin’s Russia: Culture, Society, History
REES 0410: Masterpieces of 19th-Century Russian Literature
