Profile

Anna’s graduate research focused on nationhood and nationalism in the early nineteenth-century Russian empire. She is interested in the history of national identity formation, and her work emphasizes that nationhood, something we often take for granted as natural, is both a political and literary process. Her dissertation argues that literary representations of the Ukrainian and Russian Cossack past served as models of political power and social regeneration; these poems, histories and stories reimagined the past in terms of a not-yet-present national future. Her courses also focus on the ways that we imagine our collective belonging, and she has taught a range of literature classes including: “American Literature from the Margins”, “Sex, Gender, and the Literature of Statecraft”, and “Contagion as a Cultural Metaphor”. She is currently teaching writing composition courses focusing on topics such as facts and fictions, representations and reality, and the limits of our knowledge. Her composition pedagogy focuses on critical thinking skills, form, function, and audience to help students effectively communicate complex ideas across a range of contexts.