Alex Pekov
2023-presently — Core Lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages
2022-2023 — Early Career Fellow 2022-2023, Lecturer in Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature
Education
Ph.D., Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature, Columbia University (June 2022)
M.Phil., Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature, Columbia University (October 2018), high pass
M.A., Slavic Philology and Jewish Studies, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg (2015)
B.A., Philosophy, Lomonosov Moscow State University (2009), summa cum laude
Research Interests
Ex-Yugoslav literatures, francophonie, Jewish lifeworlds, Comparative Literature, Feminist Scholarship, Queer Studies, Memory Studies, postmemory, decolonial theories, autofiction & life writing, narratology, photography & Visual Studies
Biography
As a Core Lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and the Center for the Core Curriculum, Alex is teaching two sections of Literature Humanities in the academic year 2023-2024. Currently, Alex is working on his book manuscript, entitled Toward a Transmediterranean Genealogy: Matrilineal Legacies in Sephardi Women Writers from the Former Yugoslavia and the Maghreb. In the academic year 2022-2023, as an Early Career Fellow at the rank of Lecturer, Alex taught First-Year Russian I in Fall 2022, his own content courses—The Story, She Told: Women’s Autofiction & Life Writing in Russian in Spring 2023 and Jewish Worlds in Eastern Europe: A Journey in Summer 2023. He also co-taught Senior Seminar and Introduction to Comparative Literature & Society, two required courses for the students majoring in Comparative Literature & Society and Medical Humanities.
Courses Taught
2023-2024
Literature Humanities (“Masterpieces of Western Literature and Philosophy”), required first-year course
Summer 2023
Jewish Worlds in Eastern Europe: A Journey (GU 4000-level)
Spring 2023
The Story, She Told: Women’s Autofiction & Life Writing in Russian (UN 3000-level); Introduction to Comparative Literature and Society
Fall 2022
First-Year Russian I; Senior Seminar in Comparative Literature and Society
2021-2022
Second-Year Russian I and II
June 2020, 2019, 2018
Intensive course Intermediate Russian I, June 2018, 2019, 2020 (Summer Session H). A four-week long course, comprised of sixteen hours a week. In Summer 2020—online, via Zoom.
2019-2020
Teaching Assistant for Professor Adam Leeds in 19th Century Radical Thought, Spring 2020
Teaching Assistant for Professor Alan Timberlake in Slavic Cultures, Fall 2019
2018-2019
Elementary Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian
2017-2018
Second-Year Russian I and II
Conference Activity (selected)
- “A Ficus & a Polish Gentlelady?: Postmemory, Autofiction, and Family Romance in Katja Petrowskaja’s “Maybe Esther” and Maria Stepanova’s “In Memory of Memory”,” accepted for presentation at the 55th Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies in San Francisco, CA, December 17-19, 2023
- “Desire, Intimacy, and Postmemory in Gordana Kuic’s Balkan Trilogy,” presented at the panel “Either/And: Economies of Desire and the Affixed Self,” at the annual conference of AATSEEL in Philadelphia, PA, February 17-20, 2022
- Co-organizer of the Spring 2021 Graduate Conference “Radical Care” at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University, May 14, 2021 (on Zoom)
- “Towards the Colonial Mother-land: Maternal Bodies and the Maghrebi Corpography in Sephardi Francophone Women Authors from the Maghreb,” presented at the panel “Cartographies of Corporeality: Transnational Narratives of the Jewish Body” of the 52nd Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, held online on Zoom, December 13, 2020