Skip to main content

Julie Zigoris (Draskoczy)

  • Arts and culture reporter, The Standard

Courses Taught

  • History of the Soviet Union.  Jewish Community High School of the Bay
  • English 101A: Writing the Self.  Prison University Project, San Quentin Prison
  • Incarceration as Inspiration: Russian and American Prison Narratives, Stanford University
  • Modern European History: The Soviet Experience, Prison University Project, San Quentin prison
  • Utopian Visions, Dystopian Dreams: Russian Literature and Culture from 1917-1953, Stanford University
  • Masterpieces of 20th c. Russian Literature, University of Pittsburgh
  • Early Russian Culture, University of Pittsburgh

Dissertation

A Body of Work: Building Self and Society at Stalin’s White Sea-Baltic Canal, 2010

Employment Since Graduation

    Education & Training

  • PhD, University of Pittsburgh, Slavic Languages and Literatures, 2010
  • MA, University of Pittsburgh, Slavic Languages and Literatures, 2006
  • BA, New York University, Comparative Literature and Russian and Slavic Studies, 2002
Awards
Vice-President, American Association for Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, 2016-2018
AATSEEL Award for Excellence in Secondary Teaching, 2014
Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities, Stanford University, 2010-2012
Fulbright-Hays Scholarship for Russian Language Teachers Program (ACTR), 2010
Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, 2009-2010
Nationality Rooms Scholarship for Study in Russia, Summer 2008
Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, 2006-2007
Representative Publications

Imagining the Russian Nation: The Story of Antisemitism in Soviet Samizdat." Underground Publishing and the Public Sphere: Transnational Perspectives. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2014.

Belomor: Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag.  Academic Studies Press, 2014.  Released as paperback in 2018.

“The Put’ of Perekovka: Transforming lives at Stalin’s White Sea-Baltic Canal,” The Russian Review, January 2012.

Translation, “Chronicle of Current Events,” introductory article for MEMORIAL website, March 2011.

Review of Another Sky. Dir. Dmitrii Mamuliia. In online journal KinoKultura, Issue 30 (2010). https://www.kinokultura.com/2010/30r-drugoenebo.shtml

Editorial Assistant, The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, New Haven: Yale UP, 2008.

Representative Conference Presentations

Nov. 2010: Roundtable: “Cultural Mobility in the Russian Imperial, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Contexts,” ASEEES National Conference, Los Angeles, CA

Nov. 2010: Paper: “The ‘Factory of Life’: Criminal Autobiographies from Stalin’s White Sea-Baltic Canal,” ASEEES National Conference, Los Angeles, CA

Oct. 2010: Paper: “The Put of Perekova: Transforming Lives at Stalin’s White-Sea Baltic Canal,” The Gulag in History and Memory Young Researchers Conference, Havighurst Center, Miami University in Ohio, Oxford, OH

Dec. 2009: Paper: “Charting Unmapped Territory: Tourist Guides from the Belomorkanal,” AATSEEL National Conference, Philadelphia, PA

Research Interests
  • Stalinism
  • 20th c. Russian Literature
  • Film Studies (Documentary Film, Film Noir)
  • Theories of Subjectivity (Criminal Culture, Jewish Studies)
  • Material Culture (Gulag History, Art as Propaganda)