Vladimir Ivantsov received his Kandidat Nauk degree in St. Petersburg State University (Russia), where he taught Russian literature of 19th and 20th century. His research interests cover a broad spectrum of topics including literary semiotics, Mikhail Bakhtin, Russian modernist drama, and rock and pop culture. Ivantsov published a book on a contemporary Russian writer Vladimir Makanin, and numerous articles on Russian and comparative literature.
Zora Kadyrbekova. Ph.D. candidate.
Tatiana Levesque is a PhD Student in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at McGill University. She holds a B.A. and an M.A. in Film Studies from Concordia University. Her dissertation, The Comic in the Late-Soviet and Early Post-Soviet Era: Rethinking a Bakhtinian Analysis of Laughter, under the supervision of Laura Beraha and Michael Cowan, deals with the aesthetics and socio-cultural implications of the carnival in cinema and literature. Tatiana Levesque currently holds a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. While at McGill, she has worked as a teaching assistant for the course Russian Giants of the 19th Century (I, II). She also teaches an Elementary Russian course. Her main research interests include the study of mental images in literature and film, genre studies and cultural history.
Elizabeth Pearl Morgan entered the Master’s thesis program in January 2014. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Russian Language, Literature, and Culture from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her point of inquiry draws on a wide range of important issues regarding contemporary social and cultural evolution and politics. She employs an interdisciplinary approach to her current thesis, which investigates the treatment of the historical past and Russian literary canon in 21st century Russian literature. Her favorite contemporary Russian authors include Viktor Pelevin, Zakhar Prilepin, and Boris Akunin.
Elizabeth plans to continue her research in Russia as a Fulbright scholar during the 2016-2017 academic year, concentrating on cultural and historical representations by Russian ethnic minority writers since the twentieth century. She intends to pursue a Ph.D. in Russian Studies to explore the remythologization of the “Russian soul” in Russian postmodernist literature and its significance in the formulation of “new Russian” national identity.
Lisa Stuntz is a first year MA student in Russian Studies. She earned her BA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a double major in Russian Language and Literature and English.
Izabela Zdun is a doctoral candidate (ABD) and Russian language instructor at the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University, and a certified English/Polish translator. Izabela earned her BA in Specialized English/Russian/Polish Translation and her MA in Russian Language and Literature at the University of Warsaw, Poland, majoring in Russian literature, language instruction, and literary translation. Via literary research and translation, Izabela combines her commitment to the spoken, written, and translated word.
Her research interests include the functions and changes the fairy tale genre has acquired in and exerted on genre studies today, its subversive qualities both in terms of the genre itself as well as its sociopolitical dimension. Her doctoral research focuses primarily on the implications of the intertwinement of orality and literacy and the presence of folklore in contemporary Russian literature, with the emphasis on Lyudmila Petrushevskaya's fairy tales. She is also interested in the exchange of ideas between the Polish and Russian circles in the late-Soviet period, which was facilitated by foreign periodicals and literary translation.