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Olga Blackledge

  • Visiting Assistant Professor

Olga Blackledge is an intercultural and interdisciplinary scholar of film and media.

Education and Training

  • PhD, University of Pittsburgh, 2018
  • MA, European Humanities University, 2003

Courses Taught

  • Behind Bars: Cross-Cultural Representations of the Prison in the 20th Century
  • Elementary Russian
  • Vampire: Blood and Empire

Representative Publications

Transcultural Encounters in Soviet and Post-Soviet Animation, edited volume, co-edited with Sabina Amanbayeva and Elena Goodwin, under contract with John Benjamins Publishing.

Focus on Ukraine, co-edited with Vincent Bohlinger, Joshua First, and Yuliya V. Ladygina, KinoKultura, Issue 77, July 2022 http://www.kinokultura.com/2022/issue77.shtml

“Landscape as Lebensraum: Construction of Space in Nazi German Animation,” German Studies Review 44, no. 3 (2021): 489-507.

“Food not eaten: The Dialectical Image of Food in Soviet Animation of the Brezhnev Era,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 11, no. 3 (2017): 198-211.

“Lev Kuleshov on Animation: Montaging the Image,” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12, no. 2 (2017): 110–22.

 “Violence, Chases and Construction of Bodies in American and Soviet Animated Series,” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 5, no. 1 (2010): 41-56.

Research Interests

  • Soviet film and animation
  • Ukrainian film and animation
  • Film and animation history and theory
  • Comparative studies
  • Interrelation of politics and aesthetics
  • Colonial and postcolonial studies

Representative Conference Presentations

“Ukrainian Animation on the Margins of the Empire: The Case of Davyd Cherkas’kyi’s Adventure Trilogy,” Society for Animation Studies 34th Annual Conference, Rowan University, 2023.

“Animating Art: Soviet Art of Animation,” 54th Annual Convention of Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies, 2022 (virtual). Panel organizer “Intermediality in Soviet and Post-Soviet Animation.”

“More Than Just a Line,” World Picture Conference, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, 2022.

“Once Again about Plasmaticness or Eisenstein on Line and Form in Animation,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 2022 (virtual).

“Fleischer Studios and Soviet Animation: A History of Influence,” 53rd Annual Convention of Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies, 2021 (virtual).

“The Melting Snowman: Interpretation of German Animated Imagery in Soviet Animation,” 52nd Annual Convention of Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies, 2020 (virtual).

“On Aesthetic, Narrative, and Ideological Values of the Ornamental in Animation,” World Picture Conference, University of Toronto, 2019.

Presentation on Russian digital animation at round table Performing New Media, 50th Annual Convention of Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies, Boston, 2018.

“’Under Disney’s Hypnosis’: Disney Influence and Originality of Soviet Animation of the 1930s-1940s, the Case of The Humpbacked Horse” (Koniok Gorbunok, 1947), Emerging Researches Seminar, Society for Animation Studies Conference, Montreal, 2018.

“National Spaces of Nazism: Construction of Landscape in Nazi Animation,” Cultural Studies Association Conference, Pittsburgh, 2018