Alyssa DeBlasio

  • Associate Professor, Dickinson College

Education & Training

  • PhD (with honors), Russian Literature, University of Pittsburgh, 2010
  • MA, Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh, 2006
  • BA, Philosophy and Russian Area Studies, Villanova University, 2003

Courses Taught

  • Russian language of all levels; translation
  • 19th and 20th century literature
  • Russian and Soviet film
  • Philosophy and Literature

Representative Publications

The Filmmaker’s Philosopher: Merab Mamardashvili and Russian Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2019)

“Merab Mamardashvili on Film: Cinema as a Metaphor for Consciousness,” Studies in East European Thought 71. 3 (Oct. 2019): pp. 217-227. 

The End of Russian Philosophy: Tradition and Transition at the Turn of the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, December 2014).

“‘Nothing in Life But Death’: Aleksandr Zel’dovich’s Target in Conversation with Tolstoy’s Philosophy on the Value of Death,” Russian Review (July 2014). 

“The New-Year Film as a Genre of Post-War Russian Cinema.” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 2.1 (January 2008): 43-61.

“Choreographing Space, Time, and Dikovinki in the Films of Evgenii Bauer.” The Russian Review (October 2007): 671-92.

Research Interests

  • Contemporary Russian philosophy
  • Recent Russian cinema
  • Intersections of philosophy, film, and literature

Representative Conference Presentations

“Herzen’s ‘Letter to Jules Michelet’,” Harvard Intellectual History Symposium, March 2019.

“Roundtable: Socrates in Russia,” ASEEES (San Francisco, CA), Nov. 2019.

“Mamardashvili and the History of Philosophy,” Writing a University History of Soviet Philosophy (University of Padova, Italy), Oct. 2016. 

“Soviet Philosophy on the Russian Screen,” ASEEES (New Orleans, LA), Nov. 2012.

Employment Since Graduation

Associate Professor of Russian, Dickinson College, 2016 – present 

Assistant Professor of Russian, Dickinson College, 2010 – 2016

Dissertation Title and Year

Between Philosophies: The Emergence of a New Intellectual Paradigm in Russia, 2010