JillianÌýPorter

  • Associate Professor • Director of Russian Graduate Studies
  • GERMANIC & SLAVIC LANGUAGES & LITERATURES

Jillian Porter holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College. Her research explores intersections between Russian economic history and cultural production from the late 18thÌýcentury to the present. At CU, she teaches courses on Russian literature and Russian/Soviet cinema.

Porter’s first book,ÌýEconomies of Feeling: Russian Literature under Nicholas IÌý(Northwestern UP, 2017),Ìýoffers new explanations for the fantastical plots of mad or blocked ambition that helped set the 19th-century Russian prose tradition in motion. It compares the conceptual history of social ambition in post-Napoleonic France and post-Decembrist Russia and argues that the dissonance between foreign and domestic understandings of this economic passion shaped the literature of Nicholas I’s reign (1825–1855). A Russian translation ofÌýEconomies of FeelingÌýis forthcoming from Academic Studies Press in 2020.

Porter is currently at work on a second book, entitledÌýThe Art of the Queue: From the Revolution to the Putin Era.ÌýThis book explores standing in line as a paradigmatic experience of Soviet everyday life and a generator of aesthetic forms. Porter was awarded a 2015-16 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies in support of this project, and she was interviewed about it on the Davis Center's podcast, “The Eurasian Enigma.â€Ìý

Porter is also presently conducting research on the rise of the women’s emancipation movement and the emerging science of energy in late nineteenth-century Russia.Ìý