Leah Feldman, Interim Director (2024-24)

An Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at The University of Chicago, Leah Feldman’s research explores the poetics and the politics of global literary and cultural entanglements, focusing 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 writing on the rise of the New Right in late/post-Soviet Eurasia and a book tentatively titled Feeling Collapse on Soviet film, art and performance from Central Asia and the Caucasus amidst the collapsing sensorium of the Soviet Empire. Leah Feldman work has appeared in Slavic Review, boundary 2, Ab Imperio, and Global South and she serve on the editorial collective for boundary 2. Professor Feldman has also co-authored a queer anticolonial communist children's book with the artist collective Slavs & Tatars.