Ellina Sattarova is Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California. She is a scholar of late and post-Soviet visual culture. Her research investigates the relationship between human life and political power in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia as it is conceived (both visually and narratively) in the cinematic texts of the two periods. She is currently working on a book manuscript, titled Biopolitics in Contemporary Russian Cinema.
Education & Training
- Ph.D. Slavic Languages and Literatures, Film Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 2020
- M.A. Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh (December 2015)
- M.A. Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures with a concentration in German, University of Montana (May 2013)
- BA, Linguistics; Teaching Foreign Languages and Cultures. Moscow State Linguistic University, 2009
Courses Taught
- Russian Film: Stalin to Putin
- Introduction to Film
- Art and Protest in Russia from Perestroika to Putin
- Soviet Science and Techno-Utopia
- Masterpieces of Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature
- Dostoevsky and the Russian Idea
- Madness and Madmen in Russian Culture
- Indo-European Folktales
- Russian Fairy Tales
- Elementary Russian
- Intermediate Russian
- Advanced Russian
- Fourth-Year Russian
- Elementary German
Representative Publications
“The Non-Final Cut: The Biopolitics of Necrorealist Cinema.” Russian Literature. Special issue on cultural biopolitics in modern Russia. Ed. Maksim Hanukai. (In press.)
“Russia’s Quiet Other: Dmitrii Mamuliia’s Another Sky and Aleksandr Kott’s The Test.” Cinemasaurus: Recent Russian Film in its Contemporary Context. Eds. Nancy Condee, Aleksandr Prokhorov, Elena Prokhorova. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2020.
Review of Vlad Strukov, Vera Zvereva, eds.: Ot tsentral'nogo k tsifrovomu: Televidenie v Rossii. Slavic and East European Journal 60.2 (2016): 379-80.
Review of Jeremi Szaniawski’s The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov: Figures of Paradox. Slavic and East European Journal 59.2 (2015): 322-24.
Research Interests
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Contemporary Russian Cinema
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Late Soviet Cinema
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Necrorealism
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Biopolitics
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Central Asian Cinema
Representative Conference Presentations
November 2021. Yale University’s Colloquium Series: Emerging Voices in REEES. “The Non-Final Cut: The Biopolitics of Necrorealist Cinema.”
November 2019. ASEEES. “Andrei Zviagintsev’s Narrative Games: Leviathan and Loveless as ‘Puzzle’ Films.” San Francisco.
June 2019. NECS. “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Andrei Zviagintsev’s Leviathan as a Database Narrative.” Gdansk.
December 2018. ASEEES. “Church, State, and the Body: Biopolitics of Religion in the Cinema of Andrei Zviagintsev and Kirill Serebrennikov.” Boston.
June 2018. NECS. “Filming the Death Agony of the Soviet Union: Necrorealism, Chernukha, and the Afterlife of Socialist Realism.” Amsterdam.
May 2018. CSA. “Policing the Body: The Biopolitics of Contemporary Russian Cinema.” Pittsburgh.