Daniil Leiderman is an art historian and games scholar specializing in Soviet and Post-Soviet culture. He is most interested in underground and oppositional art and in both analog and digital games as artworks.
Education and Training:
PhD, Princeton University, 2016
Courses Taught:
Russian Fairy Tales (Fall 2025)
Contemporary Cultures of Eastern Europe (Fall 2025)
Representative Publications:
1. “Ludic Epistemologies and Alternate Histories: the Soviet Past in Role-Playing Games”, Appropriating History: The Soviet Past in Belarussian, Russian and Ukrainian Popular Culture. Schwarts, M and Weller, N. eds. Bielefeld: Verlag, 2024: 133-155.
2. “Moscow Conceptualism” (in co-authorship with Mark Lipovetsky), The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture. Lipovetsky, M., Engstrom, M. Glanc, T. Kukuj, I., Smola, K. eds. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2024: 893-919.
3. “The Landscape of Durance: Utopianism and Eastern Europe in Video Games,” Russian Literature. 129 (April–May 2022): 47-71.
4. “Political Games of Chance: Monstrations and Their Ludic Tactics,” Satire and Protest in Putin’s Russia. Ed. by Alexey Semenenko. New York: Palgrave, 2021: 145-69.
5. “Poor, Poor Il’ich: Visualizing Lenin’s Death for Children” (in co-authorship with Marina Sokolovskaia), The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children, ed. by Serguei Oushakine and Marina Balina. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2021: 419-44.
6. “Moscow Conceptualism and Shimmering: Not Conforming with Nonconformism,” Russian Culture of (Non)Conformity: From the Late Soviet Time to the Present, a special issue of Russian Literature (Amsterdam), Vols. 96–98 (February–May 2018): 51-76.
Research Interests
Soviet official and unofficial culture
Artistic underground culture and protest art
Games and ludic epistemology
Representative Conference Presentations
Representative keynotes, talks, or conference presentations
“Janky Utopias: Slavic games and their narratives of Soviet and Post-Soviet history”, Workshop on Video Game Adaptations of Historical and Literary Narrations, Ruhr-Universitat, Bochum, Germany, Nov. 24th, 2024.
“Jank, Utopianism, and Empire: Post-Soviet Games and Their Lofty Ambitions”, paper at the annual convention of American Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Boston, MA, Nov. 21st, 2024
“Shimmering Sacred: Dmitri Prigov’s Visual Alchemies,” Blind-Spots of the Counter-Canon: Soviet Underground Revisited, Columbia University, February 13-15, 2023.
“Katrin Nenasheva, the contemporary performance artist/activist” Conference From the Underground to Actionism: The Contemporary Russian Context, Belgrade University, September 28th-October 2nd. 2022
“The Productive Misreading of Pop Art by Moscow Conceptualism,” paper at the annual convention of American Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. New Orleans, November 2021.
“Gamification and Anarchism in Cyberpunk 2077,” Kozmični Anarhizem (Cosmic Anarchism). Ljubljana, April 9, 2021 (via Zoom).
“Enduring Utopia: Eastern Europe in Video Games.” Inaugural lecture at the series “Emerging Voices in Russian and East European Studies,” Yale University, Fall 2020.
“Cyberpunk-Game-Poetry: Rostislav Amelin’s SimStab,” Conference Political Performativity of Contemporary Russian-Language Poetry, Giessen, Germany, Feb, 14-16th, 2020.
“Dmitri Prigov's ‘Shimmering’: Within the Image and Without It,” Keynote address at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, for the Calvert 22 exhibition “Dmitri Prigov: Theatre of Revolutionary Action” (October 12 – December 17, 2017). November 20, 2017.
“Prigov’s Term ‘Shimmering’ in the Context of Moscow Conceptualism,” The Fifth Prigov Readings, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (Russia), November 7-9, 2015.
- PhD, Princeton University, 2016