Elizaveta Dvortsova

Research, Teaching, Practice, and Clinical Appointments

• Assistant Lecturer/Teaching Assistant, University of Southern California, 2022-2025
• Teaching Assistant, Lomonosov Moscow State University, 2016-2018

PostDoctoral Appointments

• Dornsife Fellow in General Education, University of Southern California, 2025 – 2027

Summary Statement of Research Interests

I am broadly interested in Russian literature and culture of the XX-XXI centuries. One of my particular interests is Soviet cultural politics after Stalin. My dissertation, “Shaping Polemics: Soviet Critical Debate During the 1960s,” examines official governmental policies toward literature and culture, focusing on how two major literary journals of the decade – Oktiabr’ (October) in the more “conservative” camp and Novyi mir (New World) in the more “liberal” one – facilitated polemical discourse subtly regulated by the state. Through discourse analysis and close readings of articles published during the 1960s, my research highlights the overlooked, shared role of these seemingly opposing journals within the censored cultural sphere. One of the central aims of this project is to rethink imitative practices in late Soviet culture by examining their structural foundations.
My interests also include theoretical poetics, specifically the structuralist approach to poetry, and the theory of intertextuality.

My second project focuses on theorizing artistic expression, specifically the issue of “iconic” representations (i.e. the ones in which form resembles the content) on the material of Russian literature.

• IR307: Contemporary International Politics, Fall 2024
• SLL110g: Russia in the Modern Era: The Thaw Guest lecture on the Soviet culture of the early 1960s for undergraduate students., Spring 2023

• Gold Family Fellowship: Gold Family Fellows are chosen on the basis of extraordinary academic promise. Recipients of this prestigious fellowship receive a stipend to pursue research related to their dissertation. , 06/01/2024 – 08/15/2024