University of Pittsburgh Russian Film Symposium

The New Positive Hero: Masculinity and Genre in Recent Russian Cinema

Participants

Erin Alpert Mark Lynn Anderson Irina Anisimova Margaret Barton-Fumo Hillary Brevig Drew Chapman Chip Crane Nancy Condee Seth Graham Jeremy Hicks Olga Klimova Michael Kohlbrenner	Dmitry Komm Marcia Landy Siobhan Mahorter Igor Mantsov Gerald McCausland Vladimir Padunov Petre Petrov Alexander Prokhorov Elena Prokhorova Dawn Seckler Elise Thorsen
	Erin Alpert Erin received her BA in Russian Studies from the College of William and Mary in 2007. She is currently a second year graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh.
	Mark Lynn Anderson Mark Lynn Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He teaches courses in American film history, film theory, historiography and queer media cultures. He has worked as a film programmer at the International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY. His principal research is on the political economy of early Hollywood, mass reception, and regulatory practice. He has published articles and book chapters on the Hollywood star system, film censorship, and early film education. His forthcoming book is Twilight of the Idols: Hollywood and the Human Sciences in 1920s America.
	Irina Anisimova Irina is currently a first-year graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh Slavic Department. She received her BA Degree in TEFL and American Literature from Saratov State University in 2001 and PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of South Carolina in 2008. Her publications include "Metissage as an Oppositional Practice” (2006) and “Masks of Authenticity: Failed Quests for the People in Quicksand by Nella Larsen and The Silver Dove by Andrei Belyi” (2008). She has taught a number of courses in Women’s Studies and World Literature at the University of South Carolina. Her current research interests include contemporary Russian women writers, representation of the masses, and race and empire.
	Margaret Barton-Fumo Margaret Barton-Fumo is a first year PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh, with a Masters in Cinema Studies from New York University. She is interested in film aesthetics and historiography, and has contributed to Film Comment and Stop Smiling. The graduate students and faculty in the Slavic department have made her feel very welcome, and they smile at her politely when she struggles to pronounce Russian names.
	Hillary Brevig Hillary received her BA in Russian from Reed College in 2006. She is currently a second year graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh.
	Drew Chapman Graduate Student Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures University of Pittsburgh Andrew Chapman received his B.A. in Russian from University of Rochester in 2004 and his M.A. in Russian Literature from University of Pittsburgh in 2007. He is currently in his fourth year of graduate study at University of Pittsburgh, researching Soviet queue culture in literature and film.
	Chip Crane Chip Crane Received a B.A. in Theatre Studies from Georgia State University in 2001 and an M.A. in theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Pittsburgh in 2005. He is currently in his Sixth year of graduate study at the University of Pittsburgh.
	Nancy Condee Publications include The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema (Oxford, 2009); Antimonies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, co-edited with Terry Smith and Okwui Enwezor (Duke, 2008); Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Grand Style, co-edited with Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko (Northwestern UP, 2000); Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late 20c. Russia, ed. (BFI/Indiana UP, 1995). She is Executive Director of the CD-rom on Thaw cinema, Kino ottepeli (Moscow: Artima Studio, 2002). Her work, with Vladimir Padunov and separately, has appeared in The Nation, The Washington Post, October, New Left Review, Sight and Sound, and PMLA, as well as major Russian cultural journals (Ab imperio, Znamia, Voprosy literatury, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Iskusstvo kino). She has worked as a consultant for the Edinburgh Film Festival, the Library of Congress, and Public Broadcasting for several Frontline documentaries.
	Seth Graham Seth Graham completed his PhD in Russian literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh in 2003. The title of his thesis is A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot, which he wrote under the sagacious supervision of Dr Nancy Condee. A monograph based on the thesis will be published by Northwestern University Press in late 2009. Seth taught at the University of Washington, Seattle (2003-2004) and held a post-doctoral Humanities Fellowship at Stanford University (2004-2006) before joining the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, as a Lecturer in Russian in September 2006. He has participated in person or "zaochno" in all eleven Russian Film Symposia.
	Jeremy Hicks Jeremy Hicks is a Senior Lecturer in Russian at Queen Mary, University of London (UK) where he has taught courses on Russian film and literature since 1998. He is the author of Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), and various articles on Russian and Soviet film, literature, and journalism published in Russian Review, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Kinovedcheskie zapiski, and Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Televison. He is currently writing a book about Soviet wartime representations of Nazi genocide in the wider context of Holocaust film.
	Olga Kilmova Olga received her Specialist Degree in Cultural Studies from Belarusian State University in Minsk in 2001. In 2005 she graduated from Brock University, Canada, with an MA in Popular Culture, and in 2007 obtained an MA degree in Russian Literature from the University of Pittsburgh. Olga has taught a number of film and gender courses at the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University, and currently teaches language, literature, and culture courses at the University of Pittsburgh's Slavic Department. Her current research interests include post-Soviet popular culture and popular cinema, Stagnation cinema and literature, Russian youth culture and cinema, Belarusian cinema, war cinema, cultural representations of trauma, Chernobyl culture, and much more.
	Michael Kohlbrenner Mike Kohlbrenner is a second year student at the university of Pittsburgh, majoring in film studies. His main interests include film theory and production.
	Dmitry Komm Dmitry Komm (born in Leningrad in 1969) is a film critic, journalist, and the editor of the cinema section of the Media-Press publishing house. He is a regular contributor to the journal Art of Cinema (Iskusstvo kino). He has taught courses on “The Metamorphosis of Style in Cinema,” “Genres in Asian Cinema,” and “Introduction to the Cinema of the Fantastic” at the Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (St. Petersburg State University). In 2002 he received the Russian Guild of Film Scholars and Film Critics prize for a cycle of articles on problems of genre cinema. He is currently working on a monograph on the cinema of the fantastic.
	Marcia Landy Marcia Landy is Distinguished Service Professor of English/Film Studies with a secondary appointment in the Department of French and Italian Languages and Literatures. She teaches courses on film genres, film directors (e.g., Pasolini and Rossellini), national cinemas (e.g., British and Italian), film history and theory, cinema and the transnational, melodrama, and politics and film. Her articles on film have appeared in Screen, Post Script, Jump Cut, Cinema Journal, Ñew German Critique, Critical Quarterly, Journal of Film and Video, Cine-Tracts, boundary 2, and in anthologies. Her books include Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1929–1943; Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama; British Genres; Cinema and Society, 1930–1960; Cultures, Politics and the Writings of Antonio Gramsci; Queen Christina (with Amy Villarejo); Cinematic Uses of the Past, and The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality in the Italian Cinema, 1930–1945, Italian Film, and The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media.
	Siobhan Mahorter Siobhan Mahorter is currently a second year undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh, majoring in Russian Studies. Her academic interests also include International Studies and poetry writing.
	Igor Mantsov Igor' Valentinovich Mantsov was born in 1966 in Tula. He graduated from the Tula Polytechnical Institute in 1988. He enrolled in the film scholar department of the State Institute for Filmmaking (VGIK) in 1991, and in 1992 transferred to the scriptwriting department, where he worked in Iurii Arabov’s workshop. He worked in the Institute for Cinema Studies as an editor for Kinovedcheskie zapiski. He has published in both print and internet journals. Since 2000 he lives in Tula.
	Gerald McCausland Lecturer University of Pittsburgh Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures Gerald McCausland teaches at the University of Pittsburgh, where he directs the Russian language program. He holds degrees from the University of Pittsburgh (Ph.D., Russian), Middlebury College (BA, Political Science; MA Russian) and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (MA, German). His publications include articles on Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Pelevin, and Andrei Platonov as well as translations and film reviews. His current research focuses on post-Soviet Russian identity in contemporary literature and film, particularly on the question of how a psychoanalytically informed study of literature and cinema can illuminate the dynamic relationship between a social collective and its cultural production.
	Vladimir Padunov Associate Professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures Associate Director, Film Studies Program Director, Russian Film Symposium 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 publish d in the US (The Nation, October, WideAngle), the UK (Framework, New Left Review, New Formations), and Russia (Voprosy literatury, Znamia, Iskusstvo kino, Novaia gazeta). His areas of research include Russian visual culture, narrative history and theory, film history.
	Petre Petrov Petre Petrov received a B.A. and M.A. degrees from “Kliment Okhridski” University of Sofia, Bulgaria. He completed his graduate Studies at the University of Pittsburgh with a Ph.D. in Russian Literature and Culture. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University. His areas of research include Russian modernism, Russo-Soviet literary and cultural theory, Stalinist culture and socialist realism, and Soviet cinema.
	Alexander Prokhorov Alexander Prokhorov is Associate Professor of Russian and Film Studies at College of William and Mary. His research interests include Russian visual culture, genre theory, and film history. He is the author of Inherited Discourse: Paradigms of Stalinist Culture in Literature and Cinema of the Thaw (Akademicheskii proekt, 2007) and the editor of Springtime for Soviet Cinema: Re/viewing the 1960s (Pittsburgh Film Symposium, 2001). His articles and reviews have been published in Kinokultura, , Russian Review, Slavic Review, Slavic and East European Journal, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, and Wiener Slawistische Almanach.
	Elena Prokhorova Elena Prokhorova is Assistant Professor of Russian at the College of William and Mary, where she also teaches in Film and Cultural Studies programs. Her research focuses on identity discourses in Soviet and post-Soviet media. Elena's publications have appeared in Kinokultura, Slavic Review, Slavic and East European Journal and in edited volumes.
	Dawn Seckler Dawn Seckler holds degrees from Colby College (BA, Russian Studies) and the University of Pittsburgh (MA, Russian Literature). She is currently working toward a doctorate in Russian cinema; her research focuses on contemporary Russian cinema, with particular emphasis on film genre theory and masculinity studies.
	Elise Thorsen Elise Thorsen graduated with a B.A. in Russian Studies from the College of William & Mary in 2006. She is currently in her second year of graduate studies at the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.