Alexander Droznin
AM, May 2019
Alexander Droznin received his B.A. in Russian Studies and Biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. He began his graduate study at Harvard in the fall of 2016, and primarily worked on topics relating to 18th- and 19th-century Russian literature; Ukrainian literature and historiography; Jewish cultural life in Eastern Europe; Soviet dissidence and samizdat; and trauma studies. Outside of his academic work, he has been an active advocate for immigrants' and refugees' rights.
Among his recent conference presentations are "Samizdat Metanarratives and Ukrainian Dissidence: The Case of Ukrainskii visnyk (Ukrainian Herald), 1970-1972" (SCSS Annual Meeting, 2018); "The Princely Syllabicist: Antioch Kantemir’s Anacreontea and the Italian Influence on Early Russian Versification" (AATSEEL Annual Conference, 2018); "Becoming Afganushki: Late Soviet Models of Psychological Trauma and Stigmatization in Women Veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War" (ASEEES Annual Convention, 2017); and "We, Afgantsy and Chernobyl’tsy: Depersonalization in Two Case Studies of Late Soviet Catastrophe" (Grafting the Self, Annual Slavic Graduate Conference, Princeton University, 2017).
In 2017, he was awarded a summer travel grant by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, which enabled him to spend three weeks in Kyiv conducting archival research on Viacheslav Chornovil, Ukrainskii visnyk (Ukrainian Herald), and the history of Soviet Ukrainian dissidence.