Mark Lynn's research concerns the formation of media institutions, their regulatory histories, and their various audiences. Particularly interested in early Hollywood, he is completing a book on the relation of the early Hollywood star system to the formation of the modern human sciences (sociology, psychology, and anthropology). He has taught courses on film, media and critical theory at Florida Atlantic University, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and the University of Rochester. He has also worked as a film programmer for the International Museum of Photography and Film at George Eastman House in Rochester.

Liubov' Iur'evna Arkus, graduated in 1984 from the State Institute for Filmmaking (VGIK) in Moscow, where she studied in the departments of scriptwriting (L. Saitseva's workshop) and film criticism (Armen Medvedev's workshop). She worked as Viktor Shklovskii's secretary and as an editor at Lenfilm Studios. In 1989 she founded and became editor-in-chief of the journal Seans and in 1993 established Seans Press, through which she published her monograph on Sokurov in 1994 (prize of the Russian Cinema Press for best book on cinema, 1994). She conceived the idea for, has edited, and has contributed extensively to the seven-volume encyclopedia The Newest History of National Cinema, 1986-2000. Cinema and Context. The encyclopedia won the "Book of the Year" competition at the XVth Moscow International Book Exhibition and Market (in the encyclopedia nominations), as well as receiving awards from the Festival of Archive Cinema at Belye Stolby and the St. Petersburg Association of Film Critics.

Thomas Campbell is the lead curator of the Yale Slavic Film Colloquium and the coordinator of the Yale Summer Program in Saint Petersburg. He has just begun work on his dissertation, entitled "The New Artists of Leningrad and Their Environs," which will include a chapter on Leningrad "parallel cinema," as represented by the work of Yevgeny Yufit and Yevgeny Kondratiev. His publications include a book on the Petersburg alternative arts scene (Kniga vecherinok, with Igor Khadikov) and a line-by-line commentary to Joseph Brodsky's "Predstavlenie" (in Mitin Zhurnal, #53). He was also the co-editor and translator of Kabinet: An Anthology (Amsterdam, 1997), and the translator of the English-language subtitles to Alexei Balabanov's film Brother.

Publications include Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late 20c. Russia (1995); Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Grand Style, with Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko (2000); and a current project on contemporary Russian cinema (in progress).

Her work, with Vladimir Padunov and separately, has appeared The Nation, The Washington Post, October, New Left Review, Sight and Sound, as well as major Russian cultural journals (Znamia, Voprosy literatury, Iskusstvo kino).

She has worked as a consultant for the Edinburgh Film Festival, the Library of Congress, and Public Broadcasting for several Frontline documentaries and was Executive Producer for a CD-Rom database on Russian cinema, Kino ottepeli (2002). She is Senior Associate Member at St. Antony's (Oxford) and Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Council on Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), the largest US grant agency for federal funding of basic research in the former second world.

Anton D'Auria is completing his B.A. in Russian Studies and B.S. in Mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University. He wrote on film for The Moscow Times Go! Magazine in the summer of 2004 and has been curating documentary films at Carnegie Mellon since 2004. He is currently taking courses on Russian literature and history, and researching turning points in the Stalinist Great Terror. He has also done research in computer science at the Language Technologies Institute at CMU and at Dartmouth College.

Alyssa DeBlasio received a B.A. from Villanova University in Philosophy in 2003. Her research interests include Russian philosophy and intellectual history, Kierkegaard, Russian and Soviet film, and much, much more.

Alyssa worked as a reporter for channel RTVI in New York before entering graduate school in 2004.

Gennady Denisenko
Graduate Student
University of Virginia
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Born in the Russian city of Krasnodar, Gennady graduated from Tver' State University where he studied philology, English, and French. 

In 1999 he received his Master's degree in Russian and East European Studies at Florida State University, where he continued his Ph.D. studies in the humanities.

Since 2001 Gennady has been working on his Ph.D. in Slavic Literatures at the University of Virginia. His particular academic focus is Vl. Solovyov's aesthetics.  His dissertation topic is "Vl. Solovyov's Syzygial Fragmetation of 'I' and the Creative Process."

Gennady also studies cinema, considering it a unique area in which eternal philosophical problems receive special presentation.

Parallel to his dissertation, he is currently translating his M.A. thesis "Globalism vs. Russian Collectivism" for publication in Russia.

Aleksandr Stepanovich Deriabin is a film scholar and historian specializing in Soviet documentary films between the 1920s and 1960s. He graduated from the State Institute for Filmmaking in 1994 with a degree in film history. He has published more than 90 articles since 1993; in 2004 he compiled, wrote the introduction and commentary for the landmark multi-volume project celebrating Dziga Vertov: Dziga Vertov. Iz naslediia. 1: Dramaturgicheskie opyty (Moscow: Eizenshtein-Tsentr). In addition, he wrote the commentaries to Vertov's filmography, biography, and bibliography for Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Ed. Yuri Tsivian. Sacile: Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004). He is on the editorial board of Kinovedcheskie zapiski.

Julie Draskoczy received her BA from New York University in Comparative Literature and Slavic Studies in 2002. After graduating, Julie worked as an editorial assistant on a multi-volume encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. She is now a PhD candidate at the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Julie's current research interests and projects include gulag memoirs, samizdat, Yiddish-Soviet culture, and Russian and East European animation.

Seth Graham is a humanities fellow at Stanford University, where he teaches courses on Russian culture. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 2003. His dissertation, supervised by Nancy Condee, examines the genre of the oral joke in twentieth-century Russia, focusing on the links and contradictions between that genre and other constituent forms of Russo-Soviet culture. In 2003-2004 he taught at the University of Washington, Seattle. His publications include articles and reviews in Russian Review, Slavic and East European Journal, KinoForum, KinoKultura, Choice, Dictionary of Literary Biography, The Harper-Collins Encyclopedia of Women Authors, and The Routledge Encyclopedia of Contemporary Russian Culture (forthcoming). Seth has also translated widely from the Russian, including Valeria Narbikova's novel Day Equals Night, published by Ardis in 1999. He is currently writing a monograph based on his dissertation, co-editing an anthology of articles about post-censorship Russian satire, and researching Central Asian cinema.

Michelle Kuhn received a B.A. in Russian and International Relations from Beloit College in 2002. She is currently a second-year graduate student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh.

Pavel Veniamonovich Kuznetsov

Pavel Veniamonovich Kuznetsov is a writer, philosopher, and critic who has written extensively on the history of Russian and Western philosophy, literature, and cinema. He graduated from the history of philosophy department at Leningrad University 1981, but was expelled from graduate school in 1985 for disseminating "anti-Soviet" literature. His articles have appeared in many Russian journals, including Novyi mir, Oktiabr', Voprosy filosofii, Znamia, and Zvezda. He has published a novel (The Archeologist; London: OPI, 1992). He has contributed more than 200 articles to The Newest History of National Cinema, 1986-2000. Cinema and Context. He is the chief editor of the journal Stupeni, which since 2000 is published as an almanac, Stupeni (ST).

Marcia Landy
English/Film Studies Professor with a Secondary appointment in the French and Italian Department
University of Pittsburgh

Marcia Landy is Distinguished Service Professor in English/Film Studies with a Secondary appointment in the French and Italian Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Her publications include Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema 1931-1943 (Princeton, 1986); British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930-1960 (Princeton, 1991); Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama (Wayne State, 1991); Film Politics, and Gramsci (Minnesota, 1994); Queen Christina (with Amy Villarejo, BFI, 1995); Cinematic Uses of the Past (Minnesota 1996); The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality in the Italian Cinema, 1930-1943 (SUNY Press, 1998); Italian Cinema (Cambridge 2000); The Historical Film History and Memory in Media (Rutgers 2000); Stars: The Film Reader (with Lucy Fischer, Routledge, 2004); and Monty Python's Flying Circus (Wayne State, 2005). Her essays have appeared in critical anthologies and in such journals as Screen, Cinema Journal, boundary 2, and Critical Quarterly.

Evgenii Iakovlevich Margolit

Evgenii Iakovlevich Margolit, film scholar and historian, was born in Voroshilovgrad (now Lugansk) in Ukraine. He has been a senior research scholar at the Institure for Cinema Studies (Moscow) since 1989. Between 1994 and 2003 he worked as an editorial consultant for film broadcasts on channel TV6 and later channel M-1. Author of more than 500 articles published in Russia, Germany, Italy, and India, he has published two monographs:

-Soviet Film Art: Major Stages in its Foundation and Development (Moscow: BZNUI, 1988); reprinted in the journal Kinovedcheskie zapiski 66 (2004);

-Shelved Films: A Catalogue of Soviet Feature Films Not Released for National Distribution After Completion of Production or Withdrawn from Circulation in the Year of Release, 1924-1953 (Moscow: Double-D, 1995; co-authored with Viacheslav Shmyrov).

He also wrote the introduction and commentary to Thaw Cinema CD ROM, an annotated catalogue of more than 300 films.

Gerald McCausland holds degrees from Middlebury College (BA, Political Science; MA Russian) and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (MA, German). At the University of Pittsburgh he has taught courses in Russian language and folklore as well as the history of Russian cinema. His research interests include contemporary Russian culture and critical theory, with particular emphasis on post-Soviet subjectivity and its role in the formation of national identities. His publications include articles on Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Pelevin, and Andrei Platonov, and he is currently completing his PhD dissertation: The Post-Soviet Condition: Cultural Reconfigurations of Russian National Identity, at the University of Pittsburgh.

Padunov received his B.A. from Brooklyn College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He has taught at the University of Iowa and Hunter College, as well as in Germany and Russia.

Together with Nancy Condee, he directed the Working Group on Contemporary Russian Culture (1990-93), supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. His work has been published in the US (The Nation, October, WideAngle), the UK (Framework, New Left Review, New Formations), and Russia (Voprosy literatury, Znamia, Iskusstvo kino). His areas of research include Russian visual culture, narrative history and theory, film history.

Recent publications:

"Imperial Acorn —> National Oaks: The Eighth KinoForum." Kinokultura (July 2005). (http://www.kinokultura.com/articles/jul04.html).
"Stars Above Almaty: Kazakh Cinema Between 1998 and 2003." KinoKultura 3 (Jan 2004). (http://www.kinokultura.com/articles/jan04.html).
"Moscow's Silver Anniversary: XXV Moscow International Film Festival (20-29 June 2003)." KinoKultura 1 ( July 2003). (http://www.bris.ac.uk/kinokultura/art-july03.html).
"Subtropical Cinema: Kinotavr, Collective Heroes, and Small Screens," with Nancy Condee. KinoKultura 1 (July 2003). (http://www.bris.ac.uk/kinokultura/art-july03.html).
"Views of the Present As Visions of the Past," Iskusstvo kino 10, 1996.
"'Large Loose Baggy Monsters': The Poetics of Excess in Contemporary Russian Culture" in Russian Literature of the XX Century: Directions and Tendencies (Ekaterinburg: Ural State Pedagogical University, 1996).
"History and Identity in Recent Russian Cinema" in Beyond Perestroika: Jews and History in the Global Village (NY: The Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, 1995).

Petre Petrov received his B.A. degree from The Kliment Okhridski University of Sofia, Bulgaria (1997) and his M.A. degree from the University of Pittsburgh. At present, he is an advanced graduate student at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh. He is working on his dissertation, which deals with the fictional narratives of Stalinism on page and screen. His scholarly interests include narratology, hermeneutics, epistemology, history of criticism, poetics and literary theory. Graphic design and photography are two of Petrov's admissible non-academic commitments.

Alexander Prokhorov teaches Russian culture and film at the College of William and Mary. He authored several articles on Russian and Soviet literature and film.

Elena Prokhorova received her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. She is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Richmond, specializing in late Soviet and post-Soviet culture, film, and the media. Her recent publications include articles in SEEJ and Slavic Review on serial television and national identity.

Tim Schlak is a 2001 Russian Area Studies graduate of Wittenberg University. After college Tim worked for the Russia Initiative of the General Board of Global Ministries. In 2003 he entered graduate school in the University of Pittsburgh's Slavic Department. He is currently taking courses on Russian film, culture, and literature.

Jeremi Szaniawski
Graduate Student
Yale University

Jeremi Szaniawski, Yale PhD student in Film Studies/Slavic Languages and Literature, born in 1980. Graduated from the ULB (Brussels) in both Film Studies and Modern Languages and Literatures. Also holds a MA in Performing Arts. A screenwriter, script-doctor and translator (he's the editor of the Yale Journal of Translation), his academic pursuit deals with issues of canonicity and what he calls "Transmodernism", a resurgence of modernism in contemporary popular culture and cinema. He has published on the issue in BELL 2004 (Ghent, 2004) and Writing without Maps (C. Dent Tandt, ed. 2005).