Tamizdat Project Team

Yasha Klots (Project Director)

Yasha Klots is an Assistant Professor of Russian at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He holds a Ph.D. in Russian Literature from Yale University 2011, where he worked with Tomas Venclova on his dissertation, and M.A. from Boston College (2005). Before joining Hunter in 2016, he taught at Georgia Institute of Technology, Williams College and Yale. In 2014-2016, he was a Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the Research Center for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany. His research interests include Russian and East European émigré literature and book history, contemporary Russian poetry, linguistic anthropology, bilingualism and literary translation, Gulag narratives (in particular, Shalamov), urbanism, the mythology of St. Petersburg and representation of other cities in Russian literature. He is the author of articles on Varlam Shalamov, Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky, Lev Loseff, Vladimir Nabokov, Marina Tsvetaeva, Ivan Bunin and Nina Berberova, Russian children's poetry and New York City in Russian literature. In 2010, he published Joseph Brodsky in Lithuania (St. Petersburg: Perlov Design Center; in Russian), and co-translated, with Ross Ufberg, Tamara Petkevich’s Memoir of a Gulag Actress (DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP). His most recent book is Poets in New York: On City, Language, Diaspora (Moscow: NLO, 2016; in Russian), which includes his introduction and annotated interviews with 16 Russian and East European poets. He is working on a monograph Tamizdat, the Cold War and Contraband Russian Literature (1960-1970s) devoted to the circulation, reception and first publications of manuscripts from the Soviet Union in the West.

Alla Roylance (Librarian)

Alla Roylance is the Russian and Slavic Studies librarian at NYU. She came to the academy after a long spell at a public library where she curated Russian and Polish collection, and built a successful cultural series which introduced new Russian literature and film to the members of Russian-speaking audiences. Alla also received training as an archivist. Her research interests include dissident subcultures, cultural history of Russian emigration, and metadata management.

Anna Bespyatykh (Editor)

Anna Bespyatykh was born in St. Petersburg, where she graduated from the Department of Classical Philology of the St. Petersburg State University. She teaches Latin, Ancient Greek and Theory of Language. She is also a translator from French into Russian and an editor of both fiction and academic texts.

Martin Nekola (Consultant on Czech diaspora and periodicals)

Dr. Martin Nekola, Ph.D. received his doctorate in political science at the Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. His research is focused on non-democratic regimes, the era of Communism, Czech communities abroad and the East-European anti-communist exiles in the USA during the Cold War. From time to time he participates in the election observation missions organized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). He is a member of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEES) and author of more than three hundred articles and twelve published books. He is also the Czechoslovak Talks Project coordinator (www.czechoslovaktalks.com/en).