Centre for Advanced Study Sofia
Bulgaria
fellow
Rossen Djagalov
2026-2027
Home institution
Department of Russian and Slavic Studies, New York University
Country of origin (home institution)
United States
Discipline(s)
Contemporary history; Cultural studies; History of ideas; Literature
Theme(s)
Cultural Studies; Identity; Post-colonialism; Regional Studies
Fellowship dates
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Biography
Rossen Djagalov is an Associate Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. His interests lie in Marxism and culture, Soviet(-bloc) internationalism, and the history of the left, from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. His first book, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third World (2020), reconstructs the Soviet genealogy of postcolonial literature, film, and ultimately, theory. He is currently completing another book manuscript, on multinational Soviet literature, as seen through the prism of the Friendship of the Peoples literary magazine, the evolution of non-Russian Soviet Künstlerroman, and the category of social class. Tentatively entitled The People’s Republic of Letters: Towards a Media History of Socialist Internationalism, his next project examines the relationship between the political left and the different media (proletarian novel, theater, singer-songwriter performance, political documentary film) that at different times played a major role in connecting its publics globally. He has also written on late-/ post-socialist intelligentsia anti-populism and racism, on East European and Gulag literatures. He is a member of the editorial collective of Red Threads (formerly LeftEast) and the provisional committee of Black Sheep Society.
Research Project
Multinational Soviet Literature: a Brief History (a book project)
As the last thirty years have been a time of massive nationalization and de-Sovietization of culture in the former republcs, the institutional infrastructure and even the memory of Multinational Soviet literature (MSL) have been largely erased. In recent years, however, Slavic studies in the West have shown greater interest in MSL for both its role as a massive and influential instance of world literature and for the postcoloniality of its constituent literatures. Written in over 70 languages, over the course of over 70 years, however, MSL remains an unwieldy object of study. My book project focuses its account of it through three organizing principles: the literary magazine Friendship of the Peoples, which not only made available some of the canonical texts of MSL to the all-Soviet reader but also has the benefit of being a concrete object with an excellent archive and connections to other MSL institutions; the Künnstlerroman (the artist's novel), one of the non-Russian Soviet writers favorite literary vehicle for thematizing the uneven and combined development of MSL; and finally, the concept of social class, both of multinational Soviet writers and of their novels’ characters. The book's main argument is developed through its chronological structure: from a vehicle for imagining the community of the multinational Soviet Union, into which it was rather repressively institutionalized in the 1930s, during perestroika, MSL and its authors became major forces in the Soviet collapse.
Research Interests:
Literature; Soviet Union; Culture; Memory; History