Institute of Slavic Philology
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Research Interests

  • Russian-language, Czech, Ukrainian, and Belarusian literature; German-language literature and its interactions with Slavic literatures
  • aesthetics and politics (including the case of children's literature)
  • contemporary children's literature (especially picturebooks)
  • intermedial processes and multisensory media (book design, literature and visual arts, theater, film)
  • (multiple) authorship (including the case of AI-generated texts)
  • literature and artificial intelligence
  • transcultural processes and literary images of Europe at the interface of Eastern, Western and Central Europe
  • literature and historiography
  • literature and religion

Current research project: "Aesthetics and Politics of Picturebooks in Contemporary Eastern European Children's Literature".

“Memory and Media in the 21st Century: Psychological and Sociocultural Perspectives,” June 17–18, 2025.
International Workshop at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Munich), organized by Svetlana Efimova (LMU Munich) and Fabian Hutmacher (University of Würzburg, psychology).

"Politics of Text and Image in Children's Culture: Contemporary Eastern Europe and Beyond", July 18-19, 2024, Castle Blutenburg (International Youth Library), Munich.
International Workshop of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) and International Youth Library in Munich, organized by Svetlana Efimova (LMU) and Marina Balina (Illinois Wesleyan University).
https://www.ijb.de/en/events/single/politics-of-text-and-image-in-childrens-culture

For the 2024 Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES, November 21-24 in Boston), I have organized two roundtables titled “Between Past and Future: Liberating the Post–Socialist World through Children’s Literature I and II” (with speakers from the United States, Croatia, Germany, France, and Lithuania).

Invited Presentations and Conference Presentations, 2021-2025

  • "The Literary Invention of Artificial Intelligence and Its Consequences" (in German)
    April 29, 2025, Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
  • "Politics of Everyday Life in Contemporary Picturebooks by Independent Russian Authors"
    Conference „The Child and the Book 2025: Children Shaping The(ir) World: Between the Exceptional and the Everyday" (Tilburg, the Netherlands, April 23-25, 2025).
  • "Children's Agency and Empowerment in Contemporary Belarusian Picturebooks"
    March 13, 2025, University of Wrocław.
  • "The Figuration of the "Third" in Jaroslav Rudiš's "Winterberg's Last Trip" (2019)" (in German)
    January 15, 2025, LMU Munich.
  • “Visuality and Therapeutic Effects in Ukrainian Picturebooks about War.”
    2024 ASEEES Annual Convention (November 21-24, 2024 in Boston), panel “Contemporary Ukrainian Children’s Literature and Picturebooks: Adapting the Lessons of the Past, Facing the Challenges of the Present.”
  • “Creating Spaces for Intellectual Freedom in Contemporary Russian Picturebooks.”
    October 21, 2024, University of Glasgow, International Master program in Children’s Literature, Media & Cultural Entrepreneurship.
  • “Visualizing Emotions: Therapeutic Strategies in Ukrainian Children’s Books About War.”
    October 17, 2024, University of Cambridge, Centre for Research in Children’s Literature.
  • “A Laboratory of Political Thinking in Non-Fiction Picturebooks by Independent Russian Authors.”
    Workshop “Politics of Text and Image in Children's Culture: Contemporary Eastern Europe and Beyond,” July 18-19, 2024, International Youth Library, Munich. Organized by Svetlana Efimova (LMU) and Marina Balina (Illinois Wesleyan University).
  • „Ukrainian Picturebooks for Children in Times of War: Aesthetics, Politics, Psychology“ [in German].
    June 27, 2024, University of Oldenburg, part of the international lecture series „Ukraine and Belarus Interdisciplinary: Highlights of Current Research.”
  • “Children’s Nonfiction as Book Art: An Audiovisual Diptych by the Ukrainian Duo Agrafka” [in German].
    May 31, 2024, Kinderliterarisches Kolloquium [Children’s Literature Colloquium] on „Children’s Nonfiction,” online, organized by Nina Frieß (Berlin), Eva Kowollik (Halle-Wittenberg), Karoline Thaidigsmann (Heidelberg).
  • “Stories and Images for Children in War Times: Ukrainian Picturebooks of 2015-2017 and 2022.”
    Conference “Languages and cultures in times of war: (im)possible, (re)imagined, (un)manageable,” University College London (UCL) and online, May 2–3, 2024.
  • “Images of War for Children in Ukrainian Picturebooks: Aesthetic, Political, and Emotional Strategies.”
    April 29, 2024, University of California Santa Barbara, online talk at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Research Focus Group “Global Childhood Ecologies.”
  • “Allegoric and Political Images of War for Children: Ukrainian Picturebook “How War Changed Rondo” and Its Contexts.”
    Pomona College (USA), March 27, 2024.
  • “Aesthetics and Politics of Contemporary Picturebooks for Children and Teens in Ukraine and in Russia”, Slavic Colloquium, UC Berkeley, March 11, 2024.
  • “2017: Dwelling as a Medium of Memory in Russian Culture” [in German].
    Conference “Narratives of Home and Dwelling: Cultures, Crises, Utopias,” University of Innsbruck, January 24–27, 2024.
  • Discussion of the edited volume „An den Rändern der Literatur. Dokument und Literatur in zentraleuropäischen Kulturen | Tracing the Edges of Literature. Documentary Fiction in Central European Cultures” (Böhlau, 2024, ed. by Milka Car, Csongor Lőrincz, Danijela Lugarić, Gábor Tamás Molnár), Humboldt University of Berlin and online, January 11, 2024.
  • “Analyzing and Translating Picturebooks: Vijna, shcho zminyla Rondo and other works by Romana Romanyshyn and Andrij Lesiv” [in German], Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (online), for students of the Master of Translation Studies, November 30, 2023.
  • Poster presentation “Contemporary Ukrainian Children’s Literature: Aesthetics and Politics of Picturebooks in a Comparative Context” [in German].
    Conference “Developing Ukrainian Studies”, October 12–13, 2023, Dornburg Castle near Jena, organized by the joint research project “European Times” (EUV Frankfurt/O., University of Potsdam, Forum Transregional Studies, Berlin), the Aleksander-Brückner-Center for Polish Studies (Halle-Jena) and the Network for Ukrainian Studies (Jena).
  • “Once Again About Islam. Religious Teaching of the Late Tolstoy in Political Perspective”
    Conference “Tolstoy and Russian Imperialism”, organized by Michael Denner (Stetson University), Donna Orwin (University of Toronto), Tatyana Gershkovich (Carnegie Mellon University), June 17-18, 2023, Tbilisi.
  • “War and the Question of Guilt in Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1920) and War with the Newts (1936)”
    Conference “War and Science Fiction” at the Nord University of Bodø (May 31-June 1, 2023).
  • “Transnational Images of Europe in the Novels by Jaroslav Rudiš, Saša Stanišić, and Katya Petrovskaya (2010s)” [in German]
    Dec. 13, 2022, lecture as part of the lecture cycle “Eastern Europe in Focus” at LMU Munich.
  • “Politics and Culture in Russia: A Historical Perspective on the Present” [in German]
    Lecture at the event “Ukraine, Russia and the Situation in Eastern Europe” at the Academy for Political Education in Tutzing (Sept. 21-23, 2022).
  • “AI: When a Robot Writes a Play (2021): Working Practices and Stagings of Machine Authorship” [in German]
    Conference “Authorship and/as Labor: On the Relationship between Practices, Staging, and Infrastructures around 1800, 1900, and 2000” at the University of Innsbruck, Sept. 15-16, 2022.
  • “Artificial Intelligence in 1921 & 2021: R.U.R. and When a Robot Writes a Play” [in German]
    13th Bohemicum Dresdense on “A Century of Robots. Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1920/1921)”, July 02, 2022 (hosted by the Institute of Slavic Studies at TU Dresden, the Center for Central and East European Studies, the German Society for East European Studies, and the Elbe/Labe Euroregion).
  • “Biography as a Touchstone for Factographic Theory: Sergei Tretyakov’s Den Shi-khua (1930)”
    Lecture at the Slavic Seminar at the University of Tübingen, Jan. 19, 2022.
  • “An Examination of Philosophy through Literature: Alexander Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” [in Russian]
    Conference “Philosophy outside Academy in the Epoch of Enlightenment”, Jan. 29-30, 2022, online, Saint Petersburg (St. Petersburg State Pedagogical Herzen University; Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences).
  • “After Humans? Karel Čapek as a Pioneer of the Anthropocene Discourse” [in German]
    Conference “Cultures in the Anthropocene. An Interdisciplinary Challenge”, June 30-July 3, 2021, University of Innsbruck, online.
  • “Anton Čechov and the cinema of the Berlin School: Afternoon (2007) by Angela Schanelec” [in Russian]
    Conference “In the footsteps of Chekhov. Re-readings, traditions, transpositions”, May 10-13, 2021 (online, Università per Stranieri di Siena / Università di Verona / Università degli studi di Napoli “L'Orientale”).
  • “From Gulag to “World Literature”: Boris Sveshnikov as a book designer”
    Conference “Literary Classics and Intellectual Autonomy in the Soviet World from 1920s to 1980s” (University of Oxford / University of St Andrews, online, Mar. 26 & Apr. 2, 2021).
  • “Russian ABC-books with Pictures: Art, Ethnography and Politics of the Pre-Revolutionary Era” [in Russian]
    Conference “Textbook as a Model of the World and Society”, Jan. 30-31, 2021, online, Saint Petersburg (St. Petersburg State Pedagogical Herzen University; Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences).
  • “One or Two Characters? The White Plague at the Savoy Theatre (1938) and Its Unique Impact on Literary Criticism”
    Conference “Through the Lens of Karel Čapek’s Plays R.U.R. and The White Plague: Ethical Dilemmas of Industrial and Post-industrial Societies in 20th and 21st Century Theatre” (Jan. 26-27, 2021, online, Arts and Theatre Institute, Prague).
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