Cary Beehler

I am primarily interested in the literature and visual culture of the period just following the Revolution up until the turn to Socialist Realism, roughly 1917 to 1935. At Columbia, I plan to focus on figurations of the body in early Soviet literature as a site of ideological intervention and aspiration, interrogating how representations of female corporeality were employed in early Soviet narratives to promote varying visions of asceticism, menacing decadence, and fecund nature. I’m also interested in the overlaps between the women of Gothic fiction and the heroines of early Soviet fiction, as both bodies of literature grapple in some way with the real or imagined threat of women’s greater agency in the public sphere. I’d like to further research these parallels, centered around the monstrous feminine and transgressive female sexuality.

I earned an MA in European & Russian Studies from Yale University and a BA in Philosophy and Russian from Colby College

Russian
French