Come join us on January 27, from 12 noon – 2pm in the WGSI Lounge, for a brown bag lunch with Tatiana who will provide a sneak peek into the state of affairs for LGBTQ individuals and culture in Russia. We will also discuss the challenges of transitioning from a grad student to Ph.D. and further to a postdoc phase or opting out of an academic career as well as identify some strategies that can be effective in shaping your identity as a person, researcher, and teacher within the highly demanding and seemingly constraining academic environment.
Tatiana Klepikova, Ph.D. Slavic Literary Studies, University of Passau, Germany – My work strives to capture and elucidate sites, experiences, and articulations of “marginality” in Russian cultural imagination, especially in literature and the arts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A meeting point of hegemonic and alternative discourses, “marginality” as a social, political, and cultural construct fascinates me by its potential to reveal the structures of power, control, and difference that have not only to do with political oppression, but also with imaginativeness and agency, which are far less known in connection to (neo)authoritarian settings like contemporary Russia that informs my research. As a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Faculty of Arts & Science, at the WGSI, I explore these questions through the lenses of Slavic, queer and performance studies by working on my monograph about the representations of queerness in the contemporary Russian theater.