Roman Utkin

Roman Utkin
Assistant Professor
Russian Studies Department

I specialize in 20th-century Russian and Soviet poetry, prose, and visual culture, with emphases on comparative modernisms, exile, urban poetics, and queer theory. My current book project, tentatively titled Russian Berlin: Culture of a Modernist Diaspora, explores the ways Russian émigré authors forged an alternative Russian tradition abroad. As a native speaker of both Tatar and Russian, I am also interested in the cultures of Russia’s non-majority peoples, Turkic avant-gardes, and ethnic difference in a transnational world.

At Davidson I enjoy incorporating my research interests–including Vladimir Nabokov, the Ballets Russes, poetry translation, Soviet film, and LGBTQ aesthetics and politics in Putin’s Russia–into my teaching. In addition to courses on Russian language, literature, and culture, I teach a WRI 101 course, “Undesirables: Otherness and Belonging in Russia and Eastern Europe.”