Exhibition Curators
Serguei A. Oushakine. Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures
Serguei Oushakine joined Princeton in 2006, after graduating from the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He holds a joint appointment in Anthropology and Slavic Literatures and Languages. From 2024, he directs the Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Princeton.
Oushakine’s research mirrors his dual institutional belonging. His ethnographically informed publications deal with transitional processes and situations: from the formation of newly independent national cultures to post-traumatic identities and hybrid cultural forms.
Based on his fieldwork in Siberia, The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia (Cornell University Press, 2009) explored processes of negotiating the collapse of the Soviet Union by such diverse groups as Chechen war veterans, Soldiers’ Mothers, local sociologists of “vital forces,” or Communist youth groups. His more recent ethnographic encounters in Minsk (Belarus) and Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) highlight creative cinematic and photographic works that emerged in these postcolonies of communism during the last three decades.
Within the filed of literary and cultural studies, Oushakine’s publications are focused on various aspects of media literacy, spectatorship and new optical regimes – be it a history of Soviet photomontage or early Soviet books for children. During the last decade, he has been compiling a multi-volume anthology The Formal Method, which included crucial texts of early Soviet modernist authors and artists – from Boris Arvatov, Osip Brik and Alexey Gan to Viktor Shklovsky, Vladimir Tatlin and Dziga Vertov. His current project closes the divide between ethnography and cultural studies: relying on historical research, Oushakine’s new book-length project offers an anthropological analysis of aesthetic materialism, a wide movement that encompassed daily life, the organization of industrial production, labor management, and aesthetic thought in the USSR in the second half of the twentieth century.
Thomas Keenan PhD, MLIS. Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Librarian
Thomas joined the Scholarly Collections & Research Services team as Princeton University Library’s Slavic East European and Eurasian Studies Librarian in 2013. In this role he oversees one of North America’s largest research collections for the study of Eastern Europe and former Soviet territories. Thomas’s research foci include political, social, intellectual and cultural history and publishing and mass communication (in all media) in his region of focus; intellectual and cultural influence and exchange between Russia and the United States; political, cultural, intellectual, sexual and gender-expression pluralism (and their repression) in his region of focus; and continuities between medieval and modernist visual and verbal culture.
Website Design and Collection Process
Anna Meerson. Library Collections Specialist VI
Anna joined the Scholarly Collections & Research Services team at Princeton University Library in 2017. In this role she manages numerous library operations related to acquisitions, gifts, digital and special collections in the areas of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.