Eliot Borenstein's Home Page


Professor and Chair of the Department of Russian & Slavic Studies at New York University,

Director of the Morse Academic Plan.

B.A., 1988, Oberlin College, M.A., 1989, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Ph.D., 1993, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Research Interests
I work primarily on twentieth- and twenty-first century Russian literature and culture. My first book and early articles focused on Russian modernism, with a particular attention to questions of sexuality and masculinity. Most of my recent work deals with contemporary Russian popular culture (films, TV, trash fiction, advertising, new religious movements, pornography), postmodernism, and theories of cultural transmission and cultural change. My latest book Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture, is being brought out later this year by Cornell University Press. I am currently writing a second volume entitled Catastrophe of the Week: Apocalyptic Entertainment in Post-Soviet Russia.

Click here for a list of my selected publications.

Teaching
In addition to courses on modernism and postmodernism, gender and sexuality, and cultural studies and popular culture, my teaching interests also cover contemporary Central and East European fiction, utopianism and millenarianism, and conspiracy theories and paranoia.