World Socialist Temporalities

Matvey Agranovskiy is a Russian-born writer and researcher, currently based in Boston, Massachusetts. As part of his studies in Philosophy and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University, he is currently working on the comparative analysis of the concept of annihilation in the oeuvre of Alexander Kojève and Georges Bataille, following research conducted at the Bibliothèque nationale de France on the 1930s/40s unpublished Russian writings and correspondences of Alexander Kojève.  

Eliza Rose is Assistant Professor and Laszlo Birinyi Sr. Fellow of Central European Studies at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. She earned her Ph.D. in Slavic languages at Columbia University in 2020. Her articles on visual cultures of state socialism have been published in journals such as Slavic Review and Studies in Eastern European Cinema. Her first book (under review) recovers the history of a campaign in late-socialist Poland to integrate industry and the visual arts.

Antony Kalashnikov is a postdoctoral fellow in history at the University of Waterloo, Canada. His research centres on cultures of time and memory in the former Soviet Union. His first book, Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time, came out with Cornell UP in 2023. In his new project, he examines the shifting ways in which the communist future was portrayed in late Soviet utopian literature.

Nikolaos Paraschis is a PhD researcher at the Department of History at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, with a background in Russian Studies and Comparative Literature. His doctoral dissertation project involves the documentation and discussion of the influence and permeation of Soviet Literature in the Greek political Left between 1931 and 1968. He otherwise works at the intersection of Modern Greek, Russian, and Scandinavian literatures and cultures.

Yang Hua is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University. His research focuses on cultural interactions and imagined affinities between China and Russia within the historical contexts of socialist internationalism and global secularism.

Michael (M.J.) Ernst is a PhD candidate specializing in Comparative Approaches to the Literatures of Africa, the Middle East, and the Global South in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. His interests include leftist cultural production across the Arab world, Russian-Arabic literary exchange, and the postcolonial itineraries of Marxism. His work on these subjects have appeared in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Middle Eastern Literatures, and Interventions.

Yihang Zhang is currently an MA student in the program of Regional Studies-East Asia at Harvard University. His research centers on film and media culture in China and Japan, with particular interests in animation and new media, science fiction cinema and posthumanism, and media cultures of the Chinese middle class in the postsocialist era. He has conducted research on contemporary Japanese anime, commodity exchange in socialist China, and romance television dramas in 1990s China and Japan.

Daniel Schwartz is an associate professor in Russian and German Cinemas at McGill University. His research focuses on the intersection of sound studies, Russian and German cinema, cosmic cinema, and documentary film. His book City Symphonies: Sound and the Composition of Urban Modernity, 1913-1931 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024) examines the unheard sonic dimensions of ostensibly “silent” city symphony films by drawing attention to city-symphonic experiments outside the cinema, particularly those in music, mass spectacle, and radio.

Lucian Țion is an assistant professor of film and media studies at Babeș Bolyai University. He recently published a monograph entitled Romanian and Chinese Cinemas with Edinburgh University Press. He also published several articles in “Quarterly Review of Film and Video” and “Studies in Eastern European Cinema," as well as chapters in Bloomsbury’s 2020 co-edited volume Third Cinema, World Cinema and Marxism, and Cold War II: Hollywood’s Renewed Obsession with Russia.

Filip Sestan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley, with designated emphases in Critical Theory and Film Studies. He has published work on the history and aesthetics of Yugoslav and Soviet cinema. He is also a managing editor at the journal Qui Parle. 

Brian Fairley received his PhD from New York University in 2023 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the REEES Center, University of Pittsburgh. His manuscript in progress, Channeling Voices: Media, Difference, and the Search for Georgian Polyphony, is a study of music, technology, language, and race spanning the Soviet century. His work has appeared in the Journal of Sonic Studies, Ethnomusicology, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, among other places.