I am a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in English at The Pennsylvania State University, where I completed my Ph.D. My work sits at the intersection of early modern literature, global Shakespeare, adaptation and translation studies, and Russian literary culture, and it asks how canonical texts get recruited into projects of national self-definition: how artists use Shakespeare, specifically, to argue about what their country is, was, or should become.

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My first book-in-progress traces a series of Russian engagements with Shakespeare across two-and-a-half centuries, from Alexander Sumarokov’s neoclassical tragedy Gamlet (1748) to the present. Each chapter shows how these artists respond not only to Shakespeare but to an accumulated line of prior adaptations, so that constructing “Shakespeare” and constructing “Russianness” become a single, mutually conditioning act.

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At Penn State, teach ENGL 15: Rhetoric and Composition, in which I encourage students to engage critically with the media they encounter in their daily lives, interrogate the origins and foundations of their values and beliefs, and articulate their positions on issues they feel strongly about in respectful and productive ways that encourage collaboration, compromise, and creative solutions. I have also taught ENGL 101: Introduction to Literature and CMLIT 100: Reading Across Cultures. 

 

In my first-year courses, I often include “Grain of Salt” mini-lectures that demystify college systems for students, many of whom are first-generation and international students. This lecture series inspired a podcast called Learning and Leisure, a weekly show about time management—planning a term, getting through a reading list, writing the paper that's due Friday—made on the theory that work and play hold each other up. 

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I try to live by my podcast's credo, and I find that working on artistic projects informs my scholarship in exciting ways (and vice versa). In my free time, I enjoy writing fiction and poetry, making music, and painting. I am also currently co-writing a musical called In the Wake.