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Faculty Fellow

Leah Feldman

Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature University of Chicago

Biography

Leah Feldman's research explores the poetics and the politics of global literary and cultural entanglements, focusing on critical approaches to translation theory, semiotics, Marxist aesthetics and anti-colonial theory, which traverse the Caucasus and Central Asia. Her 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 the ways in which the idea of a revolutionary Eurasia informed the interplay between orientalist and anti-imperial discourses in Russian and Azeri poetry and prose. Tracing translations and intertextual engagements across Russia, the Caucasus and western Europe, it offers an alternative vision of empire, modernity, and anti-imperialism from the vantage point of cosmopolitan centers in the Russian empire and Soviet Union. Feldman is currently researching the rise of the New Right in late/post-Soviet Eurasia and writing a book, tentatively titled Feeling Collapse, on Soviet film, art and performance from Central Asia and the Caucasus amid the collapsing sensorium of the Soviet Empire. She is also co-writing a queer anticolonial communist children's book with the artist collective Slavs & Tatars.

Project

Lenin heads in the trunk of a car.

After the “End of History”: Reassessing the Communist Collapse

Project Team:

2020 – 2021