Faculty Spotlight: Fiona Bell

1. What are your primary research interests or areas of specialization?  

 I study Russian literature and culture, primarily from the Imperial period (1700s-1917). I’m interested in how ideas about bodily and social difference inform artmaking, and how art, in turn, reworks these ideas. My first book project argues that the Russian literary “classics” became canonical by framing Russianness in racializing terms, effectively answering the old question “Where is Russia, Europe or Asia?” in contemporaneous frameworks of racial difference. Far from being “beyond race,” or divorced from the West, Russian writers like Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky were involved in abolitionist debates, race science, and imperial projects, and these engagements shaped their fiction. Since the nineteenth century, their books have been celebrated as uniquely universal, humanist, dark, and soulful; but these critical tropes only rehearse the works’ own premises about Russia’s place in racial modernity. In this, and other projects, I’m interested in bringing Russian culture into transdisciplinary histories of race, gender, and sexuality, showing how Russian actors were influenced by, and influential to, global phenomena. 

 2. What current or upcoming projects are you most excited about?  

Right now, I’m writing an article about asexual theory and the Russian novel. Asexual criticism, related to and at times antagonistic to queer theory, stems from the experiences and organizing of ace people. Asexual theory helps us defamiliarize and challenge compulsory sexuality, the social expectation that everyone desires sex and relationships. In this article, I read 1860s Russia as a flashpoint for compulsory sexuality, a moment when widespread reforms rendered the nobility uncertain of its future as a class. Many novels from this period narrate this anxiety by featuring “insufficiently sexual”noblemen or noblewomen, characters who fail to marry or carry on the family line. The protagonist of Oblomov, an 1859 novel by Ivan Goncharov, loves sleeping and eating above all else. Goncharov, like other authors, is using compulsory sexuality to define his novel’s genre: if a normatively sexual hero renders a novel serious, generically centered in realism, a hero who doesn’t care about sex, like Oblomov, is the object of satire. How might we read a novel from an asexual perspective, and how might this approach help us rethink nineteenth-century Russian literature? I’m thinking through these questions by writing. 

 3. What courses are you teaching this year, and what do you hope students take away from them?  

I’m teaching “Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature,” a survey of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, which frames literature as a site of political debate in Tsarist Russia. In Spring 2026, I’m excited to offer “Russian Theater,” in which students will both read and perform Russian plays. I’m also teaching “Russophone Literatures of Resistance,” where we’ll read English translations of authors from East Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia who write in Russian, but who do not identify asRussian. Why might authors choose to write in the language of the colonizer, and how does multilingualism appear in English translation? We’ll welcome several guests who are currently writing and translating “Russophone” literature. I hope students who are curious about contemporary East Europe, Eurasia, and Russia will join the class. 

 4. How do your research interests shape your teaching approach?  

 I am fascinated by how literary value is attributed and experienced (or not!) by critics, publishers, and readers. In my courses, I encourage students to read with a mix of skepticism and openness. Who decided these works were “great,” anyway, and what political agendas does this evaluation serve? At the same time, we can’t help having visceral, sometimes surprising responses to the things we read. As individuals, and as a class, I want us to notice and interrogate our ambivalent reactions, to accommodate multiple readings at once.  

 5. Was there a particular moment, mentor, or experience that had a major impact on your academic journey  

 In college I took a course co-taught by a professor of Russian and a professor of Theater. Our core text was Chekhov’s play, The Three Sisters, which we readslowly, and many times over, in the span of the semester. Every Wednesday, we discussed the text in the classroom, and every Friday we workshopped scenes in a theater studio. I realized that acting was a rigorous method of reading, of getting close to a text, prompting all sorts of questions that don’t occur to you when you read in a chair. My course this spring, “Russian Theater,” is inspired by this experience. As a formerly shy student, by no means a “theater kid,” I love teaching embodied reading techniques to students across the stage fright spectrum. 

 6. What do you enjoy doing outside of your academic work?

 I love watching stand-up comedy, cooking, and playing chess. 

7. Are there any books, films, podcasts, series, etc. that have especially inspired you recently?  

Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg and anything by Jacqueline Novak.  

 8. What are you most looking forward to as you join the World Languages & Cultures community at the U? 

 I’m excited to get to know the students at the U!