Alexandra Novitskaya's research interests include post-Soviet queer migration and asylum and politics and geopolitics of gender and sexuality. She is studying how contemporary political and state-sponsored homophobia in Russia and other post-Soviet states is informed by the geopolitical competition between Russia and the United States and especially their mutually constitutive discourses of sexual exceptionalisms; and the real and everyday life impact this discursive competition leaves on post-Soviet queer and LGBTQ Russian-speaking migrants and asylum-seekers. She has held visiting research appointments at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, New York University, and the Summer and Virtual Research Labs at the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has published articles and book chapters on post-Soviet LGBTQ migration and homophobia in Russia as well as on gender in Russian politics in NORMA: International Journal of Masculinity Studies, The Russian Review, Post-Soviet Affairs, and the Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Together with Janet Elise Johnson, Lisa McIntosh-Sundstrom and Valerie Sperling she also wrote essays for The Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog and The Conversation. At the Russian Studies Workshop she will be working on a book project about the experiences of post-Soviet Russian-speaking LGBTQ asylum seekers in New York as well as further investigating the politics of homo- and transphobia in Russia. Outside of academia, Alexandra has been volunteering as a translator and interpreter for immigration justice non-profits in the U.S. and LGBTQ initiatives in Russia, including the LGBT Film Festival Side-by-Side.

Ilya Utekhin is an anthropologist working in anthropology of technology, medical anthropology, and in the study of talk-in-interaction. From 1996 to 2022, he taught in the Department of Anthropology, European University at St.Petersburg. He is co-curator of the Virtual Museum of Soviet Everyday Life: Communal Living in Russia, which contains ethnographic materials on on Soviet and post-Soviet urban housing, also reflected in his monograph Essays on the Communal Everyday Life  (Moscow 2001, 2004, in Russian). In 2017-20, Ilya was founder and CEO of a news aggregator service that showed two alternative agendas: official Russian media vs independent media. Ilya is the author of a number of documentary films. In Fall 2022, as a Visiting Scholar at Boston University, he worked with the materials of the Maya Deren Collection in Howard Gotlieb Archival Center. His recent book, Visual Anthropology: A Guide to Ethnographic Film (In Russian), is about the history of ethnographic filmmaking. He is a Visiting Scholar at the Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute during 2023.