Queer Focus: History and Archives (Panel 2)

Anita Kurimay, Moderator, Director, Associate Professor of History and Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Bryn Mawr College

Anita Kurimay specializes in modern European history with an emphasis on East-Central Europe.  Her main research interests include the history of sexuality, women’s and gender history, conservativism and the politics of the far right, the history of human rights, and the history of sport.  She is the author of Queer Budapest, 1873–1961.

Feruza Aripova, Visiting Scholar, Harriman Institute at Columbia University

Feruza Aripova (she/her) is a Lecturer of Modern Russian History at the Lehman College, CUNY. She is a Center Associate and a co-chair of the Gender, Socialism and post-Socialism group at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Feruza recently completed her PhD in World History at Northeastern University. Her doctoral dissertation, titled "Fifty shades of Vice: Decolonizing the Soviet homophobic legacy," sought to explore and map the impact of colonial, legal and medical perceptions of same-sex desire on contemporary state policies and public opinion in Russia and its former Eastern and Western borderlands (Central Asian and Baltic republics). 

Kamil Karczewski, Fellow, Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University College London

Kamil Karczewski is a Past & Present Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. His research explores the intersections of queerness, nationalism, and class in the history of interwar Central and Eastern Europe. Karczewski earned his PhD from the European University Institute in Florence. Previously, he was a fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg, and the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz.

Irina Roldugina, UCIS Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Pittsburgh

Irina Roldugina, originally from Moscow, Russia, received her doctoral degree from the University of Oxford. She specializes in the history of sexuality and homosexuality in Imperial and Soviet Russia. Her book, "Vernacular Queer: Gender and Sexual Emancipation in the Early Soviet State," is currently in the pipeline. Her writings can be found here.

Roman Utkin, Assistant Professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Assistant Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Wesleyan University

Roman Utkin is an Assistant Professor of Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. He is a scholar of 20th-century Russian and Russophone poetry, prose, and visual culture. His recent book, Charlottengrad: Russian Culture in Weimar Berlin (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023), provides a detailed study of the wide variety of personal and political positions Russian émigré artists in Berlin took towards the Soviet Union and Weimar culture. He also recently published a thematic cluster of articles on “Illegal Queerness: Russian Culture and Society in the Age of Anti-LGBTQ Censorship” in the Russian Review.