Russian Studies Workshop

Alexandra Novitskaya's research interests include post-Soviet queer migration and asylum and politics and geopolitics of gender and sexuality. She is studying how contemporary political and state-sponsored homophobia in Russia and other post-Soviet states is informed by the geopolitical competition between Russia and the United States and especially their mutually constitutive discourses of sexual exceptionalisms; and the real and everyday life impact this discursive competition leaves on post-Soviet queer and LGBTQ Russian-speaking migrants and asylum-seekers. She has held visiting research appointments at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, New York University, and the Summer and Virtual Research Labs at the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has published articles and book chapters on post-Soviet LGBTQ migration and homophobia in Russia as well as on gender in Russian politics in NORMA: International Journal of Masculinity Studies, The Russian Review, Post-Soviet Affairs, and the Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Together with Janet Elise Johnson, Lisa McIntosh-Sundstrom and Valerie Sperling she also wrote essays for The Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog and The Conversation. At the Russian Studies Workshop she will be working on a book project about the experiences of post-Soviet Russian-speaking LGBTQ asylum seekers in New York as well as further investigating the politics of homo- and transphobia in Russia. Outside of academia, Alexandra has been volunteering as a translator and interpreter for immigration justice non-profits in the U.S. and LGBTQ initiatives in Russia, including the LGBT Film Festival Side-by-Side.