Irina Denischenko is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. She earned her PhD from Columbia University in 2018. Her research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century literature and visual arts in Central and Eastern Europe including Russia, literary and critical theory, and women’s history in the region, especially women’s contributions to avant-garde and modernist aesthetics. She has written on Mikhail Bakhtin’s contributions to aesthetics and epistemology, Czech Poetist image poetry, theories of the avant-garde, the Hungarian playwright and Soviet theoretician János Mácza, the experimental cinema of Kira Muratova and Renata Litvinova, among other topics. She is co-editor of Cannibalizing the Canon: Dada Techniques in East-Central Europe (Brill, 2024; watch book launch here ) and co-editor and co-translator of a forthcoming volume of never-before-translated texts by Mikhail Bakhtin.
Her book manuscript, Lyrical Nomadism: Vladimir Mayakovsky and Democratic Representation in Art, puts the Soviet revolution's greatest poet in conversation with theories of the novel and feminist-posthumanist thought in order to argue for the democratic potential of lyric poetry as a mode of forging new political consciousness.
At Georgetown, she teaches courses on women's writing after socialism (Women's Writing After the Fall), on women's cinema (Woman with the Movie Camera), on the avant-garde (Radical Art in Russia and Eastern Europe), and on the aesthetics of protest (The Art of Protest) and its intersection with gender (Women and Resistance in Russia). She also organizes the annual Great Women Writers event, which brings together faculty and students from across the Faculty of Literatures, Cultures, and Language Studies to celebrate global women's writing.