Polina Barskova is a scholar and a poet, author of thirteen collections of poems and three books of prose in Russian. Her collection of creative non- fiction, Living Pictures, received the Andrey Bely Prize in 2015 and is forth-coming in German and English. She edited the Leningrad Siege poetry anthology Written in the Dark and has four collections of poetry published in English translation: This Lamentable City, The Zoo in Winter, Relocations and AirRaid. Barskova also authored a monograph, Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster and multiple edited volumes on the culture of besieged Leningrad. She teaches at UC Berkeley.
Maria Grazia Bartolini is an Associate Professor of Medieval Slavic Culture at the University of Milan. Her research focuses on the intersection of preaching and visual arts in seventeenth-century Ukraine, and she has published various articles on the religious culture of early modern Ukraine. Bartolini is the author of Piznai samoho sebe (Kyiv, 2017), a monograph on Hryhorii Skovoroda and Christian Neoplatonism, which was awarded the 2019 Ivan Franko International Prize.
Orel Beilinson is a PhD Candidate in Russian and Eastern European History at Yale University. He recently defended his dissertation, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me: Coming of Age in the Other Europe, 1813–1914.” Beyond New Haven, he was a visiting fellow at the Open Society Archives in Budapest, the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana, Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, and the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon. His recent publications include articles in the Journal of Social History and the Journal of Austrian Studies.
Luba Golburt is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination (2014) and multiple articles on Russian poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. Golburt is currently at work on a book on the Russian nature lyric as co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Russian Poetry.
Andrey V. Gornostaev is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto (Canada). His research focuses on the issues of social and transnational history in pre-emancipation imperial Russia. He is the author of several articles, published in Journal of Social History (2021), and Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History (2023); and is currently working on his first book, tentatively titled Peasants o Mobility, and Governance in Imperial Russia, 1649–1801.
Marat Grinberg is Professor of Russian and Humanities at Reed College. Among his books are “I'm to Be Read not from Left to Right, but in Jewish: from Right to Left”: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky (2011, paperback 2013), published in Russian translation in 2020; Aleksandr Askoldov: The Commissar (2016); and The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity between the Lines (2023). His numerous essays have appeared in both academic and journalistic venues.
Ilya Kukulin is a literary critic and cultural historian. Currently, he is a visiting research fellow at the Amherst Center for Russian Culture. He authored Machines of the Noisy Time: How the Soviet Montage Became an Aesthetic Method of the Unofficial Culture (2015) and co-authored the monograph, A Guerilla Logos: The Project of Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov (2022, with Mark Lipovetsky). He also published a volume of selected articles and essays.
John Paul Newman is Associate Professor in Twentieth-century European History. He is the author of Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War: Veterans and the Limits of State-building 1903–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2016). He is interested in the modern history of the Balkans and east central Europe, with a particular focus on Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Czechoslovakia.
Emily Julia Roche is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at Brown University. She holds a B.A. and M.A. from the department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. Her dissertation focuses on works and relationships among architects in twentieth-century Warsaw.
Anna Schur is the author of Wages of Evil: Dostoevsky and Punishment and The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Imperial Russia. She teaches at Keene State College in New Hampshire.
Francesca Silano is Assistant Professor of History at Providence College and a research scholar at the Northwestern University Research Initiative for the Study of Russian Philosophy and Religious Thought. She has published articles in Kritika and Revolutionary Russia, and her book manuscript, The Battle for Russia's Souls: Patriarch Tikhon, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Soviet State (1865–1925), is under contract with NIU/Cornell University Press.