I am a core faculty member in Comparative Literature. I also teach for the Clark Honors College and for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, a program I directed for nine years. Prior to joining the UO, I taught briefly at the University of Virginia and the University of Southern California, where I also held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship. In addition, I did a yearlong stint as resident director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Moscow program. Over the years, I have traveled to various cities in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Of late my research has taken me to Italy as well.

I work on modern Russian literature and culture with a focus on gender studies and environmental criticism. My first book, Beyond the Flesh: Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist Sublimation of Sex, is devoted to the interplay of gender and poetic self-creation in Russian symbolism. My second book, The Geopoetics of Catastrophe: Russian Modernism on Italian Terrain (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming), takes a new ecocritical approach to the modernists' engagement with Italy, tracing the aesthetic resonance of southern Italy's natural disasters on Russian culture. Broadening the scope of this work, I have coedited special issues of Slavic Review on Russian Geopoetics and of the Slavic and East European Journal on The 1917 Revolution and Its Ripple Effects. 

My current book project builds on my work on eco-aesthetics and my interests in Slavic immigrant art. This study, tentatively titled Nature's Icons: The Spiritual Ecology of Olga Volchkova, examines how this contemporary Russian-born artist celebrates nature's spiritual potentiality in the era of climate change and habitat loss. Trained in the fine arts and icon restoration in her native Tver, Volchkova resides in the Pacific Northwest, where she is engaged in "canonizing all the living creatures of nature" in her richly detailed paintings on wood. This generously illustrated volume will be the first major critical introduction to this remarkable woman artist who revivifies the icon form to document the relationships between flora, fauna, and humankind that have enabled us to thrive.  

In an allied initiative, I have collaborated with colleagues in UO Libraries on a digital humanities internship on Slavic Immigrant Artists in the Northwest (SIAN). SIAN enables students to earn credit for original research that is showcased on the SIAN website. There are no language requirements or prerequisites to participate, just a commitment to public research on the arts. Undergraduates register for RUSS 404 and graduate students for RUSS 604. If you are interested in enrolling, please contact me for registration approval. 

Beyond the UO, I serve as the secretary of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS). I am also the founding editor of a book series on East European and Eurasian Ecologies: Past, Present, and Future. This is the first dedicated series on the environmental humanities in Slavic Studies. If you have a manuscript that might be a good fit for our list, do not hesitate to reach out to me.