Notes on Contributors
Marina F. Bykova
is Professor of Philosophy at North Carolina State University and Editor-in-chief of Studies in East European Thought. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century continental philosophy, especially German Idealism, with particular expertise in Fichte and Hegel, as well as on Russian philosophical and intellectual traditions. She is the author or editor of thirteen books and has published over 240 scholarly articles in Russian, German, and English. Her recent volumes include The Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought (co-ed. with Michael Forster and Lina Steiner; Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and At the Vanishing Point in History. Critical Perspectives on the Russia-Ukraine War (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025).
Christopher Coquard
is English lecturer and world traveler currently living in Québec City. In his free time, he is busy with many projects pertaining to Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin and Kropotkin’s lifelong friend and amazing scientist Marie Goldsmith. He has published a series of works including: Seeds of Spring (Microcosm), The Curious One, and Kropotkin Now! (Black Rose Books), as well as a forthcoming edition of Ethics vol. 2 (PM Press). His current project looks at the life, music, and philosophy of Phil Ochs.
Alyssa DeBlasio
is John B. Parsons Chair in the Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of Russian at Dickinson College, and the editor of Brill’s book series in Contemporary Russian Philosophy. She is the author of two monographs, The End of Russian Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and The Filmmaker’s Philosopher: Merab Mamardashvili and Russian Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), and a textbook (with Izolda Savenkova), Pro-dvizhenie: Advanced Russian Through Film and Media (Georgetown University Press, 2023). With Victoria Juharyan she edited Socrates in Russia (Brill, 2022). Together with Mikhail Epstein, she runs Filosofia: An Encyclopedia of Russian Thought, the only scholarly electronic resource dedicated to contemporary Russian philosophy.
Maxim Demin
is a research fellow at the Ruhr University Bochum (Germany). His main interest is post-Hegelian philosophy and its intellectual development in German-speaking countries during the nineteenth century. Before moving to Bochum, he taught for nearly a decade at the National Research University—Higher School of Economics (HSE) in St. Petersburg and Moscow, offering courses in critical thinking, philosophy of science, metaethics, and moral psychology. His current project explores Russian philosophical and public debates on the emergence of studies of human and animal psychology and mental phenomena, tracing the transfer of psychological knowledge from the early nineteenth century to the early Soviet regime. He is also interested in digital humanities approaches to philosophy, especially journal analysis and author networks.
Anne Eakin Moss
is Associate Professor and Department Chair of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Only Among Women: Philosophies of Community in the Russian Imagination, 1860–1940, published by Northwestern UP in 2020 and in Russian translation by Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie in 2023. Her recent articles on Soviet aesthetics and media theory have appeared in journals including Screen, Film History, Die Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, and Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, as well as edited volumes on Andrei Tarkovsky and Larisa Shepitko. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled “The Special Effects of Soviet Wonder.”
Victoriya Faybyshenko
PhD in Philosophy, defended in 2001 at Lomonosov Moscow State University, examining the poetic rationality of humanitarian knowledge. Her research interests include the history and theory of subjectivity in early modern philosophy, the philosophy of history, theory of ideology, problems of philosophy and humanities in the Soviet era, and modernist poetry. She is involved in the publication and study of the legacy of the philosopher Merab Mamardashvili. Her articles are dedicated to Kant’s political theology, Hannah Arendt’s thought, and the philosophy of Merab Mamardashvili, Evald Ilyenkov, and Mikhail Gasparov.
Oksana Goncharko
holds a PhD (Candidate) in Logic, MA in Byzantine and Neo-Hellenic Philology, and a Diploma in Philosophy, all from St. Petersburg State University. Her Diploma and Candidate Dissertation examined the history of temporal logics from Antiquity to the late Soviet era, while her MA thesis focused on Theodoros Prodromos’s logical texts in twelfth-century Byzantium. Her main research interests include the history of logic and Platonic philosophy in Byzantium and their reception in post-Byzantine traditions; the history of non-classical logics and argumentation theory, with an emphasis on women’s contributions. She contributed to Logic and Ontology in Byzantine Dogmatic Polemics (Logika i ontologiia v vizantiiskoi dogmaticheskoi polemike [Russian Christian Academy for the Humanities Press, 2020]) and Validity throughout History (Philosophia Verlag, forthcoming 2026).
Anastasiya Grigorovskaya
is an independent researcher and Doctor of Philology (Habilitation) (2022, Russia). Her doctoral dissertation is dedicated to the interconnection between Russian and American traditions in Ayn Rand’s anthropological utopia. She is author of the book Ayn Rand’s Literary Works in the Russian Context (Moscow, 2020) and numerous articles in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (USA). She is a frequent participant at the Ayn Rand Memorial Conference and lecturer at the Ayn Rand House, both in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In 2020, she served as a mentor at the Ayn Rand Conference Europe (Ayn Rand Institute, Warsaw). In 2022, she conducted archival research at the Central State Historical Archive of Saint Petersburg, examining unpublished documents related to Rand’s school years at the Mariya Stoiunina private women’s gymnasium.
Søren H. Hough
is a science communicator and freelance journalist. He has written and edited at media outlets such as Science for the People magazine and RogerEbert.com, where he has interviewed figures like Noam Chomsky, Michael Marmot, and Douglas Trumbull. Hough holds a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Cambridge and has published academic articles in the fields of science, film studies, history, and bioethics. He has also written, podcasted, and lectured on the topic of germline genome editing. Hough serves as an editor at The Commoner and co-leads a historical research project uncovering the life and work of Marie Goldsmith (https://mariegoldsmith.uk/). He is the author of an upcoming book chapter about Goldsmith in Anarchist Women Translating Ideas: Multilingualism and Intermediality (De Gruyter, 2026).
Tatiana Levina
is a visiting researcher of the CUPOLA project (Kone Foundation) at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on Soviet-era philosophy, particularly the contributions of female philosophers. She graduated from Lomonosov Moscow State University with a PhD in the philosophy of art in 2007. Her most recent articles and chapters on avant-garde art and philosophy have been published by Cornell University Press, Logos Verlag Berlin, Routledge, and Springer. Her monograph, entitled The Abstract Revolution: Platonism in the Avant-Garde Era, is scheduled for publication in 2026. Her recent studies have focused on female dissidents and political prisoners in the late USSR. For the CUPOLA project, she is researching women philosophers in the Stalin era.
Olga Lyanda-Geller
is Assistant Professor of Russian, Jewish Studies, Comparative Literature, and Philosophy (courtesy appointment) at Purdue University. She holds graduate degrees in philosophy and philology (PhD, Purdue; Candidate of Science, Russia; DEA, Sorbonne, France). Lyanda-Geller’s research is interdisciplinary. Her principal interest is the nature of language, which she has been exploring from both linguistic and philosophical points of view, investigating concepts ranging from lekton in the Stoic doctrine to “inner form” and symbol in the German tradition (Humboldt, Herder, Hegel) and in Russian thought (Losev, Shpet, Bulgakov). Her work focuses on various aspects of the category of meaning, different ways of expression of sense by linguistic means, and the formation of new concepts in language, including the language of music.
Pavlo Maiboroda
graduated from Odesa Mechnikov University. His main area of specialization at the university was the history of the late Roman Empire, the struggle of ideas (religious polemics), and the confrontation between paganism and Christianity. His dissertation was devoted to the polemics surrounding the figure of Julian the Apostate. Later, he also turned to the study of the history of science, particularly the biographies of historians who were forced to survive under the harsh realities of the Soviet authoritarian regime. In recent years, his interest in antiquity has found expression in the Summer School of Classical Studies, created in collaboration with colleagues, which takes place in a mixed format: offline in Odesa and online for participants from other cities of Ukraine and abroad.
Teresa Obolevitch
is Professor and Chair of Philosophy of God and Religion at the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow. She is a member of Accademia Ambrosiana in Milan and the author of over 250 works, including Faith and Science in Russian Religious Thought (Oxford University Press, 2019), The Eastern Christian Tradition in Modern Russian Thought and Beyond (Brill, 2022), Myrrha Lot-Borodine: The Woman Face of Orthodox Theology (IOTA Publications, 2024), and From Onomatodoxy to Aesthetics: Aleksei Losev’s Concept of Symbol (Brill, 2025).
Daria Solodkaya
holds her PhD from Princeton University. She is a co-editor (with Nikolai Bogomolov and Michael Wachtel) of the two-volume correspondence between Viacheslav Ivanov and Lidiya Zinovyeva-Annibal, Perepiska (Correspondence): 1894–1903 (NLO, 2009). Her most recent contributions can be found in the collections Socrates in Russia (Brill, 2022) and Professor, a Professor’s Son: In Memory of N. A. Bogomolov (Professor, syn professora: Pamiati N. A. Bogomolova) (Vodolei, 2022). Her research focuses primarily on Pushkin’s time, Russian symbolists (especially Andrei Bely), and Russian religious philosophy. She is currently working on the translation of Roman Perelshtein’s book about the Russian religious thinkers Grigory Pomerants (1918–2013) and Zinaida Mirkina (1926–2018).
Daniela Steila
is Professor of History of Philosophy at the University of Turin (Italy). She is the author of Genesis and Development of Plekhanov’s Theory of Knowledge (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), Vita/morte (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009), and Nauka i revoliutsiia (Moscow: Akademicheskii Proekt, 2013). Together with Jutta Scherrer, she edited the volume Gor’kij-Bogdanov e la scuola di Capri. Una corrispondenza inedita (1908–1911) (Rome: Carocci, 2017). She publishes on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian philosophy, the reception of Western European traditions in the Russian and Soviet context, the history of Italian studies on Russian thought, and the traditions of philosophical historiography in Russia and the USSR.
Evert van der Zweerde
is Professor of Political Philosophy at Radboud University (Nijmegen, Netherlands). His PhD on Soviet philosophy, defended in 1994, appeared as Soviet Historiography of Philosophy in 1997. He has published in political philosophy, focusing on democracy, religion, and civil society, and on philosophy in Russia, where his publications, mostly written in English, but translated into Russian, Greek, and other languages, discuss numerous topics and thinkers, such as Vladimir Solovyov, Merab Mamardashvili, and Mother Mariia (Skobtsova). His latest monograph is Russian Political Philosophy (Edinburgh UP, 2022) and he is currently participating in the new edition of the Überweg Handbook of the History of Philosophy (Eastern Europe, nineteenth century), as well as a project on present-day state and church ideology in Russia.