Serguei Oushakine
Also by appointment
PhD with distinction in Anthropology (Columbia University, 2005)
Interests
Anthropology of emotions; transitional states; nationalism, memory and politics of history; postcoloniality; new materialism; language, narrative, and popular genres; everyday life; Communism; Soviet and post-Soviet Eurasia.
Short Bio
Serguei Oushakine has conducted fieldwork in the Siberian part of Russia, as well as in Belarus and Kyrgyzstan. His research is concerned with transitional processes and situations: from the formation of newly independent national cultures after the collapse of the Soviet Union to post-traumatic identities and hybrid cultural forms. Currently, he finishes two book-length projects. One of them explores the role of early Soviet media in creating new forms of spectatorship and new optical regimes in the 1920s-1930s in the Soviet Union. The other project focuses on postcolonies of communism, bringing postcommunist and postcolonial studies together. Oushakine’s Russian-language publications include edited volumes on trauma, family, gender and masculinity. He was a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a recipient of the ACLS’ Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (School of Social Science).
Selected Publications
The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children. Co-edited with Marina Balina (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021)
Transmediating Children's Books: An Archeology of Discarded Futures. Guest-edited cluster of essays. The Russian Review (2021, Vol. 80, No. 3)
А Medium for the Masses: Photomontage and the Optical Turn in Early Soviet Russia (Moscow: (Garage Publishing Program 2020)
“Machines, Nations, and Faciality: Cultivating Mental Eyes in Soviet Books for Children,” in The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures. Edited by Aga Skrodzka, Xiaoning Lu, and Kasia Marciniak. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 157-193)
“Second-Hand Nostalgia: On Charms and Spells of the Soviet Trukhliashechka,” in Post-Soviet Nostalgia: Confronting the Empire’s Legacies. Ed. by Otto Boele, Boris Noordenbos, Ksenia Robbe. (London: Routledge, 2019, pp. 38-69)
“Realism with Gaze-Appeal: Lenin, Children, and Photomontage,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas (2019, Vol. 67, No. 1, pp. 11-64)
“Presence Without Identification: Vicarious Photography and Postcolonial Figuration in Belarus,”October (2018, Vol. 164, pp. 49-88)
“How to Grow out of Nothing: The Afterlife of National Rebirth in Postcolonial Belarus,” Qui Parle(2017, Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 423-490)
Landscapes of Socialism: Romantic Alternatives to Soviet Enlightenment. Guest-edited symposium. Rethinking Marxism (2017, Vol. 29, No. 1)
The Twentieth Century: Letters of Wars. Co-edited with Alexey Golubev (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2016)
“Translating Communism for Children: Fables and Posters of the Revolution,” boundary2 (2016, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 159-219)
“‘Against the Cult of Things’: On Soviet Productivism, Storage Economy, and Commodities with No Destination,” The Russian Review (2014, Vol. 73, No. 2, pp.198–236)
In Marx's Shadow: Knowledge, Power, and Intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Russia. Co-edited with Costica Bradatan (New York: Lexington Books, 2010)
The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009)