Lilya Kaganovsky

My specialization is in Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet literature and film (20th-21st century), comparative literature, critical gender studies, and film history and theory. My publications range from early Russian and Soviet cinema to contemporary Russian-language film and television. My research has addressed questions of gender, sexuality, and the body in Soviet and post-Soviet culture; the history of Russian/ Soviet cinema, socialist realism, and the intersection of ideology and technology. While my two single-authored books have centered on the Stalin period, my articles and edited volumes share a broader, comparative framework, engaging with contemporary critical theory in gender and queer studies; Holocaust, genocide, and memory studies; sound studies; and documentary film. My teaching ranges from the nineteenth century to the present day, and across all periods of Soviet culture, including courses on the Russian avant-garde, Stalinism, the Thaw and late socialism, Russian/ Soviet/ post-Soviet cinema, and recent Russian-language film and television.

I approach Soviet and post-Soviet studies from a broader position as a comparatist. My first book, How the Soviet Man Was Unmade (Pittsburgh, 2008) argued that – in contrast to Stalinist monumental art’s production of virile masculinity – in literature and film, the male socialist realist hero was consistently marked by the mutilation and disintegration of his body. My attention to questions of gender and masculinity, as well as sexuality and the body in socialist realist texts opened the way for rethinking our received narratives about Stalinist cultural production. Since then, I have continued to work on issues of gender and sexuality, but I have also turned to an examination of the ways technology shapes and is shaped by ideology (including state ideology and gendered ways of seeing).

My second book, The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1928-1935 (Indiana 2018), focused on Soviet cinema’s transition to sound during the period of the mass cultural, political, and ideological shift known as the Great Turning Point. The book argued that the introduction of sync-sound technology to Soviet cinema was more than simply an addition of sound to image, but rather, that it made audible, for the first time, the voice of State power, directly addressing the Soviet viewer. The Voice of Technology showed how the films of the transition all marked this ideological shift from silence to sound and from the avant-garde to Socialist Realism; moreover, how each film staged its relationship to the new technology of sound as the production and the imposition of the “voice.”

My current scholarship on Soviet women’s cinema continues my engagement with both questions of gender / sexuality and the history / technology of Soviet cinema. This study is part of the emergent reexamination of the history of women’s work in the film industries across the globe, and its aim is to broaden the canon, both of Slavic film studies and of women’s cinema writ large. By focusing on a wide range of women’s cinematic production in the USSR and looking closely at the work of directors, cinematographers, and film editors, this project resituates the work of women within the Soviet cinema industry, providing a new historical and theoretical lens through which to understand their contributions. The goal is to make visible women’s work in the Soviet film industry, and to elaborate a new understanding of women’s cinema that redefines film practice in both the East and the West. By bringing together the work of women who labored within an industry where their gender didn’t “matter,” we begin to see clearly all the ways in which it did.