Notes on Contributors
Sarah A. Burgos
holds a PhD in art history and is an art and military curator and historian who specialises in foregrounding the visual and tangible materiality of art and artifacts as intimate lenses into the past and present. She is the director of the Museum of the Virginia National Guard in Richmond, Virginia. Her PhD dissertation, The Exhibition Catalog as Medium: Mid-Twentieth-Century American Exhibition Catalogs as Documents and Autonomous Artifacts at the Virginia Commonwealth University codified printed exhibition catalogues as a dexterous medium capable of shielding, buttressing, clarifying, and even eliminating exhibition installations. Her latest essay, “Rose-Colored Reconciliation: The Role of Handcraft in Post-Civil War Veteran Gift Giving,” examines three bespoke pink punch bowls that Union veterans commissioned in 1881 for former Confederate veterans to analyse how later generations displayed the porcelain set when the first Civil War Centennial coincided with the Civil Rights Movement (forthcoming in: Craft, Wellness, and Healing in Contexts of War, edited by Jennifer Way).
Clemens Günther
holds a PhD in comparative literature and is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Cultural Department at the Institute for East European Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. His research interests comprise the late and post-Soviet historical novel, the cultural history of cybernetics, climate fiction, and the ecological poetics of Russian realism. Recent publications include “Cybernetic Socialism in Dissident Discourse” (Kritika 24:2, 2023), “The Alien Republic: Narratives of Deterritorialization in Imaginations of Turkmenistan” (Slavic Review 81:1, 2022) and “Die politische Ökologie des Treibhauses in der russischen Literatur” (Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, forthcoming). He is the author of Die metahistoriographische Revolution. Problematisierungen historischer Erkenntnis in der russischen Gegenwartsliteratur (2021).
Natasha Gordinsky
is a senior lecturer and chair of the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa. She holds a PhD in Hebrew literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her current research focuses on Hebrew modernism and contemporary translingual literature. She is the author of two books: In Three Landscapes. Leah Goldberg’s Early Writings, (2016 in Hebrew, German translation “Ein elend schönes Land.” Gattung und Gedächtnis in Lea Goldbergs hebräischer Literatur by Rainer Wenzel, 2019); Kanon und Diskurs. Über Literarisierung jüdischer Erfahrungswelten (2009, with Susanne Zepp). She has recently co-edited two volumes: In Their Surroundings. Localizing Modern Jewish Literatures in Eastern Europe (2023, together with Efrat Gal-Ed, Sabine Koller and Yfaat Weiss) and Disseminating Jewish Literatures. Knowledge, Research, Curricula (2020, together with Susanne Zepp, Ruth Fine, Kader Konuk, Claudia Olk and Galili Shahar).
Anna Hodel
holds a PhD in Slavic Literatures and is a deputy professor of Slavic literatures at the University of Basel. Her research interests encompass Eastern European Theatre studies, Literature and art in crises, Artistic revolts, Feminist Literature, Discourses on Europe, Literature of the Romantic Age, National and imperial narratives in literary discourse. Her recent publications include Alles muss zu Ende erzählt werden. Zu Bojan Savić-Ostojićs Novelle Punkt (2023); “Wo liegt eigentlich Osteuropa?” (Das Kulturmagazin 1, 2023); Imagining the 90s. Modes of Narrating the First Post-Soviet Decade in Literary, Visual and Performative Cultures (2023, edited together with Gunnar Lenz); Geschichtete Identitäten. (Post)Imperiales Erzählen und Identitätsbildung im östlichen Europa (2021, edited together with Thomas Grob); Romantik jenseits des Nationalen. Geopoetik der Südslavischen Romantik im imperialen Raum (2020).
Ilya Kukulin
holds a PhD in Russian literature from the Russian State University for the Humanities. Currently, he is a research fellow at Amherst College, Amherst, USA. His research interests include the history of Soviet unofficial poetry, the sociology of today’s Russian culture, the cultural history of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, the gender history of post-Soviet literature, Soviet sci-fi literature, the politics of childhood and children’s literature of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, Russophone social networks, as well as trauma and memory in today’s Russia. Recent publications include Machines of Noisy Time: How the Soviet Montage Became an Aesthetic Method of the Unofficial Culture (2015, in Russian) and Breakthrough to an Impossible Connection: Essays and Articles on Russian poetry (2019, in Russian). His most recent book The Guerrilla Logos: The Project of Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov (2022, co-authored with Mark Lipovetsky) discusses the works of the well-known poet, artist, and theorist of art in a broad historical context.
Gunther Martens
is Professor of Modern German Literature at Ghent University and co-director of the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities. He studied linguistics and literature at the universities of Ghent, Antwerp, and Eichstätt. He has written a widely acclaimed monograph on the rhetorical and narratological aspects of German literary modernism and has published both edited volumes and articles that have appeared in journals such as Style, Modern Austrian Literature, Recherches Germaniques, Orbis Litterarum, Neophilologus, Language and Literature, and others. He is the honorary president of the European Narratology Network and a board member of the International Robert Musil Society. His research interests include encyclopaedic literature, computational literary studies, and literary disability studies.
Elena Nekrasova
received a PhD in cultural studies from St Petersburg University. Today, she is an Associate Professor at the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts. She also works as a film critic. Her research focuses on Soviet and Post-Soviet studies, the history of Soviet documentary, modern television visual studies, and the history and theory of film genres. Recent publications in Russian include Cinematographic Realism of Old and New World from Traditional to Revolution (co-edited, 2021); “Maxim Gorky and Proletkult. Points of Contact and Contradictions” (2019). “Film Adaptations of L.N. Tolstoy’s Novel “Anna Karenina”. Genre Aspects” (2020).
Tatjana Petzer
is a Professor of Slavic Literary and Cultural Studies at the Karl-Franzens-University of Graz, Austria. Her research interests include Slavic epistemological, visual, and material cultures and literatures as well as ecological and future aesthetics in the European and global context. Recent publications include Immortality. Slavic Variations (edited, 2021; in German), and Knowledge and Faith. Figurations of the Synergos in Slavic Modernism (2021; in German), the topic of her habilitation thesis at the University of Zurich.
Matthias Schwartz
holds a PhD in comparative literature from the Freie Universität Berlin. He heads the program area World Literature at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in Berlin, Germany. His research interests include Eastern European contemporary literatures, memory cultures, and popular cultures in a globalised world; documentary aesthetics and Socialist travel literature, the cultural history of Soviet and post-Soviet adventure literature, science fiction, science popularisation, and space travel. Recent publications include Appropriating History. The Soviet Past in Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian Popular Culture (co-edited, 2024); After Memory. World War II in Contemporary Eastern European Literatures (co-edited, 2021); Sirens of War. Discursive and Affective Dimensions of the Ukraine Conflict (co-edited, 2020; in German); Eastern European Youth Cultures in a Global Context (co-edited, 2016).
Franziska Thun-Hohenstein
is a senior fellow of the Leibniz-Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL), Berlin, Germany. She edits the German edition of the collected works of Varlam Shalamov (in eight volumes); Recent publications include Das Leben schreiben. Warlam Schalamow. Biographie und Poetik (Writing live. Varlam Shalamov. Biography and Poetics, 2022); “‘Grudge-holding Body.’ Body and Memory in the Works of Varlam Shalamov” (2021, in The Gulag in Writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov: Memory, History, Testimony, edited by Fabian Heffermehl and Irina Karlsohn).
Anja Tippner
is a Professor of Slavic Literatures at the Universität Hamburg; Her research interests include the concepts of documentation, auto/biography, and life-writing, literary representations of experiences of catastrophes (war, trauma, violence), Holocaust and Jewish literatures in Eastern Europe and translations studies; Recent publications include “Liudmila Ulitskaia’s Childhood 45–53. Documenting Nostalgic Images and Memoirs on Growing-Up Soviet after the Great War in Literature” (Jahrbücher für die Geschichte Osteuropas, 67:1, 2019); “Addressing the Void: The Absence of Documents and the Difficulties of Representing the Shoah in Postcatastrophic Russian Jewish Literature,” (2021, in The Afterlife of the Shoah in Central Eastern European Cultures: Concepts, Problems, and the Aesthetics of Postcatastrophic Narration, co-edited with Anna Artwińska); Documentary Literature, Film and Theatre in Eastern Europe and the Baltics (forthcoming, co-edited with Johanna Lindladh).
Georg Witte
was a Professor of Comparative Literature and Slavic Literatures at the Peter Szondi Institute and the Institute for Eastern European Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, until his retirement in 2019. Here, he participated in research programs on Languages of Emotion and Aesthetic Experience. Additionally, he headed a research project on Rhythm and Projection. Since September 2019, he was the head of the Philological Department of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Saint Petersburg, where he resigned following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. His primary research interests are Russian culture in the twentieth century, literature as a medial practice, Eastern European avant-gardes, and Samizdat poetry. He translates and edits Russian conceptualist art and literature (Ilya Kabakov, Dmitrii Prigov, Vsevolod Nekrasov, the group “Collective Actions” and others) and contemporary Russian poetry (Kirill Medvedev, Pavel Arsenev, Roman Osminkin and others).
Renate Wöhrer
studied art history in Vienna and Hamburg and received her PhD at Freie Universität Berlin. She then worked as a researcher at the collaborative research programme Ästhetische Erfahrung im Zeichen der Entgrenzung der Künste (Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of the Artistic Limits) at Freie Universität Berlin and at the research training group Das Wissen der Künste (The Knowledge of the Arts) at the University of the Arts in Berlin. In her research, she examines the genealogy of documentary practices of visual representation. Currently, she works at the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Vienna. Publications include her monograph Dokumentation als emanzipatorische Praxis. Künstlerische Strategien zur Darstellung von Arbeit unter globalisierten Bedingungen (2015) and the edited volume Wie Bilder Dokumente wurden. Zur Genealogie dokumentarischer Darstellungspraktiken (2015).
Christian Zehnder
is a professor of Slavic literatures at the Otto Friedrich University of Bamberg. His research interests include Russian and Polish literatures of the eighteenth to the twenty-first century at the intersection of poetics and the history of ideas, intellectual history, and religion; the Warsaw underground during World War II, the late Soviet underground culture of Leningrad; the Soviet cinema of the 1960s; ecopoetics and ethical criticism. Recent publications include A Space of Agency and Play: Rewritings of Romantic Activism in Polish Literature (2022; in German); An Archeology of Modernity: Cyprian Norwid Revisited (co-edited thematic cluster, 2022); Abundance and Ascetism in Russian Literature: Confrontations, Passages, Coincidences (co-edited, 2020; in Russian).