Graduate Students

Benjamin Arenstein

barenstein@uchicago.edu
Research Interests: 20th-century Russian literature, modern Hebrew literature, literary exchange, translation theory, ecocriticism, Soviet émigré writing.
Cohort Year: 2019

Nadezhda Gribkova

ngribkova@uchicago.edu
Research Interests: Russian Modernism and European Avant-Garde; 20th-century religious thought in Eastern Europe; Cold War-era artistic practices; and conceptual and blockchain art
Cohort Year: 2023

Anna Kaluher

akaluher@uchicago.edu
Research Interests: Eastern European critic’s agency during war and civil conflicts during and after WW2, Criticism in Exile, Frankfurt school influence on Post Soviet literary theory, narratology and readership, critical deconstruction and rhetoric
Cohort Year: 2024

Julia Kulon

juliakulon@uchicago.edu
Research Interests: 20th-century Polish art and culture, literature and intellectual history; Socialist Realism in Eastern Europe; Polish-Jewish studies; disability and sound studies; aesthetics and ideology
Cohort Year: 2022

Andrei Kureichik

kureichik@uchicago.edu
Research Interests: Protest Art in the USSR and post-Soviet Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, Soviet and post-Soviet Cinema and Theatre Hidden Masterpieces, and Cultural Decolonization of Soviet and Post-Soviet Slavic Nations. Innovative practices of Art Resistance.
Cohort Year: 2025

Oliver Okun

ookun@uchicago.edu
Research Interests: Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian poetry and protest, Eastern European anti/post-colonialism, museum and exhibition curation
Cohort Year: 2019

Alina Orlova

orlovaa@uchicago.edu
Research Interests: Research interests: Ukrainian and Russian dissident cultures, national literature, national identity, cultural colonization, and forms of artistic resistance to systems of oppression
Cohort Year: 2024

Chana Toth-Sewell

chanas@uchicago.edu
Research Interests: Animal studies, 20th-century Yiddish and Russophone literature, translation studies, ecocriticism
Cohort Year: 2023

Olena Tsykynovska

lenatsykynovska@uchicago.edu
Research Interests: Russian- and Ukranian-language poetry and the literature of cities.
Cohort Year: 2022