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Alyssa DeBlasio

  • Professor of Russian; John B. Parsons Chair in the Liberal Arts & Sciences, Dickinson College

Courses Taught

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

Dissertation

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

Employment Since Graduation

    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
Awards
Slavic-Eurasian Research Center Fellowship at Hokkaido University (Sapporo), Fall 2020
US Dept. of State Russia-US Peer-to-Peer Dialogue Grant, 2014-2015
American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 2014-2015
American Philosophical Society, Franklin Grant, 2014-2015
Yegor Gaidar Jr. Fellow of the Center for Russian Studies at the Presidential Academy of the National Economy (Moscow), Summer 2012 and Summer 2013
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 2012
Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, January-July 2009
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.

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.

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