Alexandar Mihailovic

A combined interest in LGBTQ studies, comparative literature, film studies, and Eastern European culture is at the center of Alexandar Mihailovic’s writing and teaching. Among other subjects, he writes and teaches about artificial intelligence in literature and popular culture, postcolonial women writers and filmmakers, and Russian Jewish literature.

 

Biography

Mihailovic has written about a range of subjects, including theology and literary theory, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian and Ukrainian literature, the criminal subculture in Russia, cultural relations during the Cold War, popular music, African American studies, art history, music, and cinema studies. In his recent publications, he examines the global rise of the populist right-wing movements and the current struggle for LGBTQ rights in Russia. He has also translated Russian literature and literary criticism.

His book about the confluence of American and Russian far-right populist movements, Illiberal Vanguard: Populist Elitism in the United States and Russia, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in February 2023. Screening Solidarity Neoliberalism and Transnational Cinemas, the book he co-authored with Patricia A. Simpson and Helga Druxes, will be released by Bloomsbury Academic in April 2023.

Mihailovic's other books include: Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theology of Discourse (Northwestern University Press), the edited volume Tchaikovsky and His Contemporaries: A Centenary Symposium (Greenwood Press) and The Mitki and Art of Postmodern Protest in Russia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018). The Russian translation of an updated and expanded version of that book came out with the New Literary Review (NLO) Press in Moscow, in the series ‘Studies in Visual Culture’, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Kandinsky Prize in the category of writing about contemporary Russian art.

In 2016, together with Helga Druxes and Karolin Machtans, Mihailovic edited the collection Navid Kermani: Contemporary German Writers (Oxford, UK: Peter Lang Oxford), about the Iranian-German fiction writer and respected scholar of Islam who has positioned himself as a forthright critic of xenophobia and the resurgent far-right within Germany. 

Mihailovic has taught at Williams College, Columbia, and Brown. He has received fellowships from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, and the Oakley Center for Humanities and Social Sciences at Williams College. Mihailovic received his B.A. from Columbia, and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale. He was a recurring visiting faculty member at Bennington from 2012-2023.