Katerina Clark designated the Bensinger Professor
Katerina Clark, newly named as the B.E. Bensinger Professor of Comparative Literature and of Slavic Languages and Literatures, focuses her research on Russian, European, and Eurasian film, literature, performing arts, art, architecture, and literary theory; cultural interactions; world literature; and art and ideology.
Clark’s present book project, tentatively titled “Eurasia without Borders?: Leftist Internationalists and Their Cultural Interactions, 1917-1943,” looks at the interactions during the inter-war years of European culture producers with counterparts in Asia, principally in Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, northern India, China, Japan, and Mongolia. Her other books include “The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual,” “Mikhail Bakhtin” (with Michael Holquist), “Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution,” “Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941,” and “Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917-1953” (with Evgeny Dobrenko).
Clark’s primary film expertise is in Russian film of the 1920s, the 1930s, and the post-Stalin and post-Soviet decades. She also writes on European and Asian film of the 1920s and 1930s. For five years she was a member of the core faculty for the Working Group on Contemporary Russian Culture, which comprised scholars from the United States, Great Britain, and Russia. The group met annually in one of these countries to analyze recent trends in Russian film and literature. She has also served as president of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. At Yale she has been the convener of a committee that for the past 15 years has organized an annual conference on European film.
A graduate of Melbourne University (Australia), Clark earned her Ph.D. from Yale in 1971. She has taught at the State University of New York-Buffalo, Wesleyan University, the University of Texas-Austin, Indiana University, and the University of California-Berkeley.
