My research focuses on the relationship between art and literature and the shaping of post-Soviet public culture. In my first book project, tentatively entitled Another Russia:
Post-Soviet Nationalism and Protest Culture, I study the ways in which the aesthetics and culture of Eduard Limonov’s National-Bolshevik Party, a radical countercultural movement, has influenced the development of Russian protest culture and the formation of state ideology during the Putin era. The project combines textual analysis with the discussion of ethnographic material that I collected during year-long fieldwork in Moscow, including over forty interviews with contemporary Russian intellectuals and political activists. Before coming to Brown in the summer of 2016, I completed a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. I grew up in Milan, Italy, where I received a B.A. and an M.A. in Foreign Languages and Literatures (Russian and English) from Milan State University. During my graduate and undergraduate training, I spent several years of study and research in Moscow, Russia, where I was affiliated with the Russian State University for the Humanities (RGGU) and Moscow State University (MGU). My interests include Soviet and post-Soviet literature and film; post-Soviet politics and ideological discourses; postsocialist transition; Russian nationalism and national identity; cultural studies; cultural anthropology; Russian postmodernism; and visual and iconographic aspects of Soviet culture. At Brown I will be teaching courses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian culture, literature, and politics.
