Serguei Alex Oushakine
My research interests lie in several areas and disciplines. As an anthropologist, I work in Eurasia, where I explore how the collapse of state socialism has simultaneously undermined already existing communities and precipitated the emergence of new ones. In my book, The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia, I trace the importance of experienced or imagined traumas for creating postsocialist identities and meanings. I have also continued my study of the cultural representations of identities that emerge at the intersection of gender, nation, and law by writing about male bandits in Russian cinema and female detectives in Russian prose. My new areas of research focus on postcolonial authoritarianism in Belarus and Kyrgyzstan, the practices of late Soviet consumption, the political mobilization of popular culture in Soviet Russia, and socialist nostalgia.
In 2009-2010, I published two co-edited volumes. Травма:Пункты[Trauma:Points], edited with Elena Trubina, includes thirty essays on history, ethnography, and theory of trauma written by authors from Canada, Great Britain, France, Russia, Belarus, Sweden, Ukraine, and the USA. The second volume, In Marx's Shadow: Knowledge, Power, and Intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Russia(co-edited with Costica Bradatan) presents thirteen essays that explore a link between Communism and intellectual production. In 2009-2010, I conducted my fieldwork in Minsk (Belarus) and Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) for my new book on postcolonialism in Eurasia. At the moment, I am preparing for publication a major anthology of Russian Formalists and Constructivists (in Russian).
Undergraduate Courses:
Between Heaven and Hell: Myths and Memories of Siberia
Socialism with a Human Face: Daily Life under the Soviet Regime
The Future Is Now: Revolution and Utopia in Early Soviet Culture
(Co-taught with Devin Fore, German Department).
Russia Today
Value Added: Exchanges, Markets, Morality
Revolutionary Minds: Framing Russia’s Upheavals
Money: Equivalent, Value, and Symbol
Graduate Courses
Language and Subjectivity: Theories of Formation
Readings in Critical Theory (Co-taught with Nick Nesbitt, French Dept.)
Family as a Genre
