Dissertation Title:

Detki v kletke: The Childlike Aesthetic in Soviet Children’s Literature and Unofficial Poetry

Ainsley's major interest is twentieth-century Russian poetry, although since she started off with a master's in Comparative Slavic literatures from UNC-Chapel Hill (where she focused on twentieth-century Serbian and Yugoslav literature), she does her best to keep a foot in the Yugoslav door. She has recently been having a fine time with the phenomenal Yugoslav avant-garde, with special attention to Miroslav Krleza. In studying poetry, Ainsley is partial to close readings combined with a literary-historical approach, with attention to social relations and genealogies, real and imagined.

Fields of activity:

• 20th c. Russian literature, esp. the 1910s-30s and 1960s-80s 
• samizdat, underground literature and culture 
• Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian and Yugoslav literature
• contemporary Russian poetry
• literary translation

Translation is an important part of her academic practice; she has translated a wide range of Russian prose and poetry (mainly post-war through contemporary) and is at present hoping to work more on translating from Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian.

Recent publications:

• I Live I See: The Selected Poems, by Vsevolod Nekrasov, translated by Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich, UDP 2013
• Anatomical theater (poems by Andrei Sen-Senkov), translated by Peter Golub and Ainsley Morse, Zephyr 2012
• "(In memoriam) Georgii Ball: Opyt perevodchika", in NLO no. 113 (2012).