Yasha Klots

Yasha Klots received his Ph.D. in Russian literature from Yale University in 2011 and M.A. from Boston College in 2005. Before joining Hunter College, CUNY, in 2016, he taught at Georgia Institute of Technology, Williams College and Yale. In 2014-2016, he was a Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the Research Center for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany. His research interests include Russian and East European émigré literature and book history, contemporary Russian poetry, linguistic anthropology, bilingualism and literary translation, Gulag narratives (in particular, Shalamov), urbanism, the mythology of St. Petersburg and representation of other cities in Russian literature. In 2010, he published Joseph Brodsky in Lithuania (St. Petersburg: Perlov Design Center; in Russian), and co-translated, with Ross Ufberg, Tamara Petkevich’s Memoir of a Gulag Actress (DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP). His most recent book is Poets in New York: On City, Language, Diaspora (Moscow: NLO, 2016; in Russian), which includes his introduction and annotated interviews with sixteen Russian and East European poets. He is currently completing a monograph Tamizdat, the Cold War and Contraband Russian Literature (1960-1970s) devoted to the circulation, reception and first publications of manuscripts from the Soviet Union in the West. He is also the director of Tamizdat Project, an online archive of documents on “contraband” Russian literature (1956-1991).