My primary field is early modern literature, and my work has developed along two related lines. The first is reception, appropriation, and translation, with a focus on Russian engagements with Shakespeare from the mid-eighteenth century into the twenty-first, spanning neoclassical tragedy, realist fiction, socialist-realist film, and postmodern drama. The second returns to the early modern stage itself, where I am interested in the political mechanisms that literary texts dramatize—observation, testimony, succession, service—and in how institutions sanction, weaponize, or contest them. Running through both is a longstanding interest in irony and allegory, particularly in the moments when a work acknowledges its own construction and, in doing so, unsettles what it seemed to be saying.
