Russian Studies Workshop

Christy Monet  is a dual PhD candidate in Political Science and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. She previously attended UMBC, later earning a BA in Political Science from St. Mary’s College in Maryland and an MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political theory and literary theory, with a special focus on the role of literature in the production of social and political ideologies and imaginaries. Christy’s most recent article, ‘Russia’s Post-Soviet Ideological Terrain: Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan and Debates on Authority, Agency, and Authenticity,’ co-authored with Susanne Wengle and Evgenia Olimpieva, was published in Slavic Review in 2018. Her dissertation, entitled “Political Imagination and Liberal Reform: Figuring the Family in 19th-century Russian Literature,” explores the emergence of liberal ideas in the context of Russia’s late imperial period and the ways in which primarily Western ideas were reconfigured to respond locally to affective strategies of autocratic rule. Christy argues that contract rationality may not be the best lens through which to engage with the history of liberalism in Russia. Instead, attention to a more affective form of rationality and, indeed, an affective form of liberalism more aptly demonstrates the innovative and contradictory contours of Russian liberalism and its fate. In 2020-2021, Christy is a Visiting Scholar at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University.