Mikhail Itkin is a PhD student in the interdisciplinary Slavic and Film and Media Studies program at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his BA in Philology from the Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia) and an MA in Art Criticism from the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Saint Petersburg State University. His current research interests include late-Soviet and postmodernist literature and visual culture, narratology, and social philosophy. He published works on Vladimir Korolenko, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, David Samoilov, and made presentations on international conferences, including the Conference for Junior Philologists in Tartu, Estonia. He is also the editor and regular contributor to the ‘samizdat’ journal K! Film Criticism and Theory, based in Saint Petersburg.