Amherst Center for Russian Culture Alexandar Mihailovic, "Firebrands of Anti-Modernity: Populist Elitists in the United States and the Russian Federation"

Recent years have witnessed a growing affinity between radicalized right-wing movements in the United States and Russia, countries that have often viewed each other as intractable foes. Alexandar Mihailovic will discuss this confluence, taking into consideration the ethnonationalist movements in both countries, together with their paradoxical attitudes to gender, LGBTQ+ identities, race, and performative identity. 

Alexandar Mihailovic is a Professor Emeritus of Russian and Comparative Literature at Hofstra University. He received his B.A. from Columbia, and his M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale. He has taught at Williams and Bennington Colleges and at the graduate programs at Columbia and Brown and has received fellowships from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, and the Oakley Center for Humanities and Social Sciences at Williams College. 

His books include Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theology of Discourse (Northwestern University Press) and the edited volume Tchaikovsky and His Contemporaries. The Russian translation of an updated and expanded version of his book The Mitki and Art of Postmodern Protest in Russia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018) came out with the New Literary Review (NLO) Press in Moscow, in the series ‘Studies in Visual Culture’, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Kandinsky Prize in the category of writing about contemporary Russian art. 

Mihailovic’s two most recent books were released in 2023. Screening Solidarity: Neoliberalism and Transnational Cinemas, the book he co-authored with Patricia A. Simpson and Helga Druxes, was published by Bloomsbury Academic Press. In Illiberal Vanguard: Populist Elitism in the United States and Russia (University of Wisconsin Press), he examines the confluence of American and Russian populist nationalist movements and groups. 

This event is sponsored by the Amherst College Russian Department and the Lurcy Lecture Fund.