People

People

Director SERGUEI OUSHAKINE is Behrman Associate Professor of the Humanties, Departments of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures. His research interests include sociolcultural anthropology, ethnography of postcolonialism in Eurasia, contemporary Russian culture, nationalism, trauma and memory, socialism, and late-Soviet and post-Soviet documentary film. His fieldwork centers on Eurasia, examining how the collapse of state socialism simultaneously undermined existing communities and precipitated the emergence of new ones. His recent book, The Patriotism of Despair (2009), was based on two years of fieldwork in his native Siberia. Ph.D. Columbia University.

	Program Manager KATHLEEN ALLEN 210B Aaron Burr Hall 609.258.5978
Faculty
	MARGARET H. BEISSINGER is a research scholar and teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her interests include oral epic, Balkan oral traditions, Romani (Gypsy) traditions and culture, gender issues in Balkan literature and traditional culture, and South Slavic and Romanian languages. Ph.D. Harvard University.
	MARK R. BEISSINGER is a professor of politics and director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. His teaching and research interests focus on nationalism, social movements and revolutions, state building, and imperialism, with special reference to the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet states. Beissinger is author or editor of four books, including the award-winning Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State. Ph.D. Harvard University.
	KSANA BLANK is a senior lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her interests include nineteenth-century Russian prose, Russian religious thought, and history of the Russian language. Ph.D. Columbia University.
	ELLEN CHANCES, *72 is a professor of Russian literature and culture in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her interests include nineteenth- , twentieth-, and twenty-first-century Russian novel; contemporary Soviet and post-Soviet Russian literature and culture; Dostoevsky; Kharms; Chekhov; the interdisciplinary study of literature in its historical context; literature and ideas; literature and values; literature and cinema; comparative Russian and American literature and culture. Ph.D. Princeton University.
	COLE M. CRITTENDEN is the associate dean for academic affairs at the Graduate School. His research and scholarly interests include Russian and Eastern European drama (especially Chekhov) and theater studies. He has taught Russian language and literature Princeton, Harvard, and Rutgers-Newark. Crittenden earned his Ph.D. in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton.
	CARYL EMERSON is the Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literatures. Her research interests include Mikhail Bakhtin, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, the context and relevance of literary and cultural criticism, and most recently, the adaptation of Russian literary classics to the Soviet-era stage. Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin.
	DEVIN FOREis an assistant professor in the Department of German and an affiliate faculty member of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. His interests include Russian Modernism in literature and the visual arts; avant-garde documentary; and Formalist poetics. Ph.D. Columbia University.
	ERIKA H. GILSON is a senior lecturer in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. Her interests include Turkic languages, language acquisition, instructional technology, and language learning. Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania.
	MICHAEL GORDIN is a professor in the Department of History and the Program in the History of Science, and director of the Fung Global Fellows Program. Gordin’s interests range widely across the history of modern sciences, with particular emphasis on science in Russia and the Soviet Union, as well as nuclear history. He is the author of The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (2012), Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (2009), Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (2007), and A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table (2004). Ph.D. Harvard University
	JAN GROSS is the Norman B. Tomlinson ’16 and ’48 Professor of War and Society in the Department of History. His interests include comparative politics, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes of modern Europe, Soviet and East European politics, and the Holocaust. Ph.D. Yale University.
	IRENA GRUDZINSKA GROSS is an associate research scholar in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her interests include East European literature and history, especially poetry and politics. Ph.D. Columbia University.
	M. SÜKRÜ HANIOGLU is chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies and director of Program in Near Eastern Studies. His research interests include late Ottoman diplomatic history, late Ottoman history, and Turkish political life. Ph.D. Istanbul University.
	OLGA PETERS HASTY is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her interests include nineteenth-century Russian poetry, Russian post-symbolist poetry, formalism, the Russian avant-garde, Nabokov, émigré literature, and Russian drama. Ph.D. Yale University.
	DEBORAH KAPLE *91 is a research scholar and lecturer in the Department of Sociology. Her interests include Chinese-Soviet comparative studies, socialist economics, the Stalin period, and the Gulag. Ph.D. Princeton University.
	ANNA KATSNELSON is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her work centers on Russian visual culture of the 20th century. She is interested in the transition from the avant garde to socialist realism; the interrelationship of art and politics; performativity, mobility, and identity; Russian, Eurasian, and diasporic cinema; and in the Russian-Jewish artistic renaissance that occurred in the early part of that century. Ph.D. Harvard University.
	JOSHUA KOTIN is an assistant professor in the Department of English. His research interests include poetry and poetics, modernist and avant-garde writing (especially in English and Russian), the relationship between the writer and the state, and critical and social theory. Ph.D. University of Chicago.
	STEPHEN KOTKIN is the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and the vice dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His interests include authoritarianism, geopolitics, global history, empire and institutions, the avant-garde and dictatorship, global cities, as well as Russia, Asia, and Europe. Ph.D. University of California–Berkeley.
	SIMON MORRISON *97 is a professor in the Department of Music. His interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian music, ballet, and film music. Ph.D. Princeton University.
	PETRE PETROV is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. His interests include Soviet modernism, socialist realism, Stalinist culture, and Russian and Soviet critical theory. He teaches Polish language and courses on twentieth-century Russian literature and culture. Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh.
	GRIGORE POP-ELECHES is an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His interests include postcommunist democratization and economic reforms; communist and precommunist legacies; and elections and political parties (especially populist and extremist parties). Ph.D. University of California-Berkeley.
	EKATERINA PRAVILOVA is an assistant professor in the Department of History. Her interests include the legal relationship between the individual and the Russian absolutist state; the history of Russian imperialism and resource distribution; tax policies; and imperial currencies. Ph.D. St. Petersburg Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences.
	MICHAEL REYNOLDS *03 is an associate professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. His interests include interactions between the Ottoman and Russian empires, the North Caucasus, Islamic mysticism, international relations, and the intersection between the study of history and social scientific theories and methods. Ph.D. Princeton University.
	KIM LANE SCHEPPELE is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values as well as the director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton. She is also a faculty fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her interests include comparative constitutional law in postsocialist countries; socialist legality; the development of postsocialist legal institutions and popular legal consciousness; and Hungarian political and legal culture. Ph.D. University of Chicago.
	STANISLAV SHVABRIN is a lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. His interests include Slavic languages and language acquisition, cultural legacy of Russian diasporas, Russian Modernism, literary translation, and comparative literary studies. Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles.
	MICHAEL WACHTEL is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. His interests include Russian literature, comparative literature, and poetics. Ph.D. Harvard University.

Past Faculty

Past members of the faculty include Leonard Babby, Joachim Baer, Nina Berberova, James Billington, Cyril Black, Jerome Blum, Clarence Brown, Richard Burgi, Stephen F. Cohen, Laura Engelstein, Herman Ermolaev, George Florovsky, Joseph Frank, Allen Kassof, George Krugovoy, A. James McAdams, Gilbert Rozman, S. Frederick Starr, Charles Townsend, Robert Tucker, John Turkevich, Laura Tyson, William Wohlforth, and Richard Wortman, among others.

Alumni

Undergraduate Certificate Recipients

Master of Arts

Ph.D.