Erin Alpert
Tony Anemone
Irina Anisimova
Hillary Brevig
Drew Chapman
Nancy Condee
Nikolai Condee-Padunov
Chip Crane
Beach Gray
Joshua First
Nikolai Izvolov

Vida Johnson
Olga Klimova
Nicola Kuchta
Adam Lowenstein
Gerald McCausland
Daniel Morgan
Vladimir Padunov
Petre Petrov
Alexander Prokhorov
Elise Thorsen
Frederick H. White

Tony Anemone

Associate Professor of Russian, Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages at The New School.

Educated in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University (B.A.) and the University of California Berkeley (M.A., Ph.D.), Tony Anemone taught Russian literature and cinema at Colby College and the College of William and Mary before taking up a position at The New School in 2006. His publications on a broad range of topics from 18th century Russian culture, to Russian literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, and contemporary Russian cinema have appeared in books and the leadings journals of the field, including Russian Review, Slavic Review, Slavic and East European Journal, Revue des Etudes Slaves and Wiener Slawistischer Almanach. He is a member of the editorial boards of Slavic and East European Journal, Kinokultura, and Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema.

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 fifth year of graduate study at University of Pittsburgh, researching Soviet queue culture in literature and film.

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.

Nikolai Condee-Padunov

Nikolai Condee-Padunov is an undergraduate senior at the University of Pittsburgh, focusing on Political Science and Philosophy with a minor in History and a certificate in Global Studies.

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 seventh year of graduate study at the University of Pittsburgh.

Beach Gray

Beach Gray graduated with a B.A. in Russian Studies from Williams College in 2007. He is a first year graduate student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. He is interested in contemporary post-Soviet and Eastern European culture.

Joshua First

Joshua First, who received his Ph.D. in History at the University of Michigan in 2008, is presently a post-doctoral fellow at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University of Ohio. In the Fall, he will join the History faculty at the University of Mississippi as the Croft Assistant Professor of History and International Studies. Recently, Joshua has published articles on Ukrainian poetic cinema, Soviet film sociology, and the politics of melodrama during the Brezhnev era. He is currently working on a book entitled, Scenes of Belonging: Cinema and the Multinational Imagination during the Soviet 1960s.

Nikolai Izvolov

Nikolai Anatol'evich Izvolov was born in Kostroma in 1962. In 1985 he graduated from the scriptwriting-film scholar department of the State Institute for Filmmaking (VGIK). He was the academic editor of Veniamin Vishnevskii’s catalog of pre-Revolutionay documentary films (1996). Between 1991 and 1996 he worked at the Eisenstein Museum as the head of the sector for non-feature films and deputy director of research. He was the vice provost of research and scholarship at VGIK (1996-7). Since 1997 he has been at the Institute for Cinema Studies as the director of the sector of domestic cinema (renamed the Historical-Theoretical sector). Starting in the 1990s he has taught at VGIK and the Advanced Courses for Scriptwriters and Directors.

At the Institute for Cinema Studies he has worked on computer reconstructions of “lost” films; these include Leninist KinoTruth (1996), Hold that Thief! (1998), Tit, or the Tale of a Big Spoon (2000), Engineer Prait’s Project (2001), Alcoholism and its Consequences (2001); Mishki Against Iudenich, On the Red Front, The Marriage, and Dokhunda (all 2006); The Country-House Husband and Lawlessness (both 2010). Together with Natasha Drubek he has created HYPERKINO, a method of providing commentary about films using digital technology. He is the author of The Phenomenon of Cinema: History and Theory (2001). He was named Best Film Scholar of the Year in 2001 by Gosfilmofond.

Vida Johnson

Vida Johnson received her B.A. in Russian History and Literature from Radcliffe College and her M.A. and PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. For many years she has been Professor of Russian language, culture, and film as well as the Director of the Russian Program at Tufts University in Boston. She has been a long-time consulting editor or co-editor for film for the Russian Review.

She is the author of articles and reviews on literature and film and co-author with Graham Petrie of The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue (1994). Her current areas of research are contemporary Russian and Central Asian cinemas as well as the cinemas of the former Yugoslavia. Her most recent contributions are a special edited issue on Serbian Cinema in kinokultura.com, and a co-edited dual language collection of film articles by young Serbian critics titled Introducing Youth: Self-Reflections on Serbian Cinema (Uvodjenje mladosti: Sami sebe naslikati.), published by Film Center, Serbia (2008).

Olga Klimova

Olga is a PhD candidate at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh. She 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. She is working on her PhD dissertation which focuses on the Aesopian language in Soviet youth film drama of the 1970s through early 1980s.

Olga’s 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, theories of spectatorship, and much more.

Daniel Morgan

Daniel Morgan is an assistant professor of film studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published articles on a variety of topics, and is currently completing a book manuscript on Jean-Luc Godard's films and videos since the late 1980s.

Petre Petrov

Petre Petrov is an Assistant Professor of Russian at Princeton University, where he teaches courses in twentieth-century Russian literature and culture, Russian and East-European cinema, and Polish language. His research focuses on Stalinist culture in the historical context of modernity and the intellectual context of Western and Russian modernism. He has published journal and encyclopedia articles on socialist realism, Thaw film, and Russian formalism. During the current academic year, Petre holds a fellowship at the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh. He is working on a book project provisionally entitled The Future Is What Follows: Stalinism and the Traffic of Essences.

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.

Elise Thorsen

Elise Thorsen holds a B.A. in Russian Studies from the College of William & Mary (2006) and an M.A. in Russian Literature from the University of Pittsburgh (2009). This is her third year of graduate study at the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, as well as her third year as a member of the Symposium organizing committee. Her current research interests include Soviet imaginative geography and empire.

Frederick H. White

Frederick H. White is Associate Dean (Research and Graduate Programs) in the Faculty of Arts at Memorial University (Newfoundland, Canada). In 2006, he published Memoirs and Madness: Leonid Andreev through the Prism of the Literary Portrait (MQUP). This initial research led to an examination of Andreev’s own first person narratives of illness, investigated within the cultural context of “degeneration” as it was understood in the Russian fin de siècle, resulting in the recently completed book manuscript, Neurasthenia: Constructions of Madness in the Life and Narratives of Leonid Andreev. He is now beginning a project on representations of the Russian Silver Age in post-Soviet film.