Leah Feldman’s research focuses on empire, nationalism, and critical approaches to ethnicity, gender and sexuality from the vantage point of the Caucasus and Central Asia. Her first book, On the Threshold of Eurasia: Orientalism and Revolutionary Aesthetics in the Caucasus (Cornell 2018, winner of the Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Prize), exposes how the idea of a revolutionary Eurasia informed the interplay between Orientalist and anti-imperial discourses in Russian and Azeri poetry and prose. Her current work explores how affect and embodiment provide crucial theoretical registers for thinking about the collapse of the Soviet empire and rise of authoritarian ethnonationalism in the contemporary moment. To that end, her working monograph Feeling Collapse explores waning attachments to internationalist feelings amid the collapse of the Soviet empire and how performance art, film, and theater in the Caucasus and Central Asia during the 1980s and 1990s shaped alternative politics and publics. She is also co-editing the anthology Anticolonial Thought and is co-author, with artist collective Slavs and Tatars, of a forthcoming art book, Azbuka Strikes Back: An Anticolonial ABCs.