I am an assistant professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages, an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Film and Media Studies, and core faculty member of the Romanoff Center for Russian Studies at the University of Oklahoma, where I teach courses on Russian literature, cinema, and culture.
I wrote my first book, An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film, to explore ways of approaching films that are imagined and prepared, but never actually made, in this case examining film projects of the 1920s and 1930s by the great Soviet filmmaker.
My current book project asks how animals and images of them were used to produce new political and socioeconomic movement in the cinema of the early Soviet Union.
I am particularly interested in ecological approaches to understanding mimetic and performative art forms.
I am also a photographer. My professional work in this capacity has been primarily in “art,” editorial, and promotional contexts within the music and culture industries. My clients have included: magazines like Monocle and The Fader, and record labels like Sony, Atlantic, Secretly Canadian, and many others.
Photographs I have made have appeared in publications ranging from The New York Times to The Guardian, and online in outlets like Pitchfork, The A.V. Club, and NPR.
I live in Oklahoma but work on occasional commission elsewhere.
If you'd like a custom print of an image I've made, please write to me.