Milla Fedorova graduated from Moscow State University where she studied Russian Literature and Language. She wrote her Doctoral thesis on Russian Postmodernist Poetry in 2000. Before joining the Slavic Languages Department at Georgetown in 2006, she taught courses in Russian Language and Culture at University of Illinois at Chicago. Her area of expertise is Russian twentieth century literature (including its marginal genres, such as sci-fi and crime fiction), film, and Internet. She is especially interested in intertextual relations: in the texts she studies, she searches for patterns and unexpected connections that sometimes go beyond the twentieth century. She researched Hoffman’s subtexts in Dostoevsky, M.Bulgakov’s argument with Tolstoy, Rousseau’s influence on Pushkin. Fedorova wrote on Russian Gangster as a nostalgic hero, Soviet pedagogy of patriotism (images of America in Soviet children's literature), three ages of cinematic Russian nostalgia – from A. Tarkovsky to A. Balabanov. Her book Yankees in Petrograd, Bosheviks in New York (DeCalb: NIU Press, 2013) examines the myth of America as the Other World in Russian literature and film. Fedorova's second book on Post-Soviet film adaptations of Russian literature Adaptation as Symptom: Russian Classics on the Post-Soviet Screen (in Russian) was published in 2021 by NLO (New Literary Observer, Moscow).
Currently, Fedorova is working on a project dedicated to Chicago: her next book will ''read'' the city, its history, architecture and culture through the prism of texts about the city, including but not limited to those by Russian writers.