Interdisciplinary Approaches to Russian Literature, History, and Culture
My research engages a range of interdisciplinary topics, with a central focus on Russian literature, revolutionary thought, authoritarianism, and the history of ideas. I explore the interplay between literature, society, and historical change in Russia and Europe, particularly through the works of authors such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Boris Savinkov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Mikhail Sholokhov, Boris Pasternak, and others.
I’m a native of Vancouver, B.C. and completed my undergraduate degree at Simon Fraser University. I attended grad school at The University of Toronto where I completed my MA and PhD in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.
Currently, I’m an Associate Professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages and Director of The Charles T. McDowell Center for Global Studies at The University of Texas at Arlington.
Coming Soon
I’m excited to announce my forthcoming volume on Russian revolutionary terrorism:
Personas of Revolutionary Terror in Russian Fiction and Memoirs from Dostoevsky to Zenzinov
(Academic Studies Press, forthcoming, 2025)
An interdisciplinary study of fiction and memoirs by and about pre-revolutionary terrorists in Russia, Personas of Revolutionary Terror explores the phenomenon of Russian revolutionary terrorism with a focus on how the image of a revolutionary terrorist was developed through discursive modes of self-fashioning and life writing. As attitudes toward conventional literary heroes changed in the decades leading up to the Russian Revolution, the radical intelligentsia exploited the genres of novel and memoir, adapting them as forums for theatrical performance and identity-building of the terrorist persona.
The “myth of the heroic assassin” is the subject of numerous works of fiction and memoir, which were intended to justify the moral transgressions of political violence and spur on further revolutionary action. By examining the cultural and political context of revolutionary terrorism, my new research provides a deeper understanding of how these acts were both a product of and a reaction to the broader revolutionary culture, building on my earlier work on Bolshevik cultural policies and language weaponization.
