Education & Training
- PhD, Slavic Languages and Literatures "Territory and Empire in Early Soviet Poetry," 2016
- MA, Slavic Languages and Literatures (Russian Literature), University of Pittsburgh, 2009
- BA, Russian Studies, College of William and Mary, 2006
Courses Taught
- Russian language (1st and 2nd year; TA for advanced course on topic of "Folk Laughter" taught in Russian)
- 20th Century Russian Literature
- Russian Short Story in Context
- Madness and Madmen in Russian Culture
- Russian Fairy Tales
- Sci-Fi: East and West
- Forbidden Love on Page and Screen
Representative Publications
“The ‘cinematic poetry’ of the Thaw.” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 12.1 (January 2018): 1-17.
Review of Lera Surkova's Pagans (2017). In KinoKultura 59 (January 2018). http://www.kinokultura.com/2018/59r-iazychniki.shtml
Birnbaum, David J., Elise Thorsen. "Markup and meter: Using XML tools to teach a computer to think about versification." Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conf. 2015, Washington, DC, Aug. 11 - 14, 2015. Proceedings of Balisage. vol. 15.
Review of Denis Shabaev's Not My Job (2015). In KinoKultura 54 (October 2016).
Review of Nariman Skakov’s The Cinema of Tarkovsky: Labyrinths of Space and Time. In Slavic and East European Journal 57.1 (Spring 2013): 127-128.
Review of Nila Friedberg's English Rhythms in Russian Verse: On the Experiment of Joseph Brodsky. With David J. Birnbaum. Language 90.3 (September 2014): 765-767.
Research Interests
- Contemporary Russian Cinema and Media
- Computational Methods in the Humanities
- 20th Century Russian Poetry
Employment Since Graduation
Dissertation Title and Year
Territory and Empire in Early Soviet Poetry, 2016