Utopian Substances in and Beyond the Soviet Empire

Auriane Benabou is PhD student in the Comparative Literature department at NYU with a background in Slavic Studies and the Environmental Humanities. She graduated from Brown University in 2021 where she earned her B.A. and M.A in Slavic Studies and Environmental Studies and Slavic Studies. Her interests range from 20th and 21st century literature, folklore studies, environmental history, Russian and Soviet dystopian fiction, and insect humanities.

Asiya Bulatova is a researcher working on Soviet and Anglo-American modernist literatures in their cultural, scientific, and biomedical contexts at Södertörn University, Sweden. She earned her doctorate at the University of Manchester and has been a postdoctoral fellow at the New Europe College in Bucharest, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and Centre for Advanced Studies Sofia. She was also employed as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow at the University of Warsaw. Her monograph Writing and Other Bodily Functions: Viktor Shklovsky’s Involuntary Modernism is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic. She has published in edited collections and peer-reviewed journals Poetics Today, Comparative Critical Studies, and Modernism/modernity.

Aurelia Cojocaru is an Assistant Professor of Humanities at Bilkent University in Ankara. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley (2022). Her research investigates the problem of method in East European, Anglo-American, and French modernist poetics. In parallel, she works on Post-Soviet and Immigrant Literatures. She also writes poetry in Romanian and English, and has published a book of poetry in Romanian titled Du-te Free (2015).

George Kovalenko is a Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. His research is focused on problems in Marxist poetics, comparative modernisms, and philosophical aesthetics.

Mieka Erley is Associate Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Colgate University. She studies the cultural history, literature, and cinema of late Imperial Russia and the USSR in relation to science, materiality, and the environment. Her first book, On Russian Soil: Myth and Materiality, was shortlisted for the 2021 AATSEEL Best First Book Award. She serves on the editorial board of the series "East European and Eurasian Ecologies" at Academic Studies Press.

Flora Roberts is Assistant Professor in Environmental History at Utrecht University, and explores in her writing (though mostly in her teaching) how the physical environment – built as well as natural – shapes patterns of social interaction, and conversely, the extent to which societal forms and cultural systems affect, or determine, the type and extent of environmental transformations enacted.

Aleksandr Prigozhin is Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. His first book, Modernism, Media, and the Politics of Common Life, is forthcoming with Johns Hopkins Studies in Modernism.