Julia Chadaga
Julia Chadaga is an Associate Professor of Russian Studies at Macalester College. Her research and teaching interests include Russian literature, material and visual culture, and the relationship between art and crime in Russian cultural history. She has published in the journals Russian Review, Slavic Review, and Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature.
She has an essay in the edited volume Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe. Her book Optical Play: Glass, Vision, and Spectacle in Russian Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2014) was shortlisted for the Historia Nova Prize for Best Book on Russian Intellectual and Cultural History.
Michael Cherlin
Michael Cherlin’s musical career has included a three-year stint in army bands during the Viet Nam War, nearly five years of playing in a Soul Music band out of Brooklyn, New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, an undergraduate degree from Rutgers and graduate work at Yale.
His publications include Schoenberg’s Musical Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Varieties of Musical Irony (Cambridge University Press, 2017). His current project is entitled Music’s Making: The music of poetry, the poetry of music. Along with Sumanth Gopinath, he co-authored “Somewhere down in the United States: The Art of Bob Dylan’s Ventriloquism” (included in Highway 61 Revisited, University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
Karen Evans-Romaine
Karen Evans-Romaine is Professor of Russian in the UW-Madison Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic and co-director of the UW-Madison Russian Flagship Program. She and co-director Dianna Murphy have co-edited a volume on the Language Flagship. Richard Robin, Evans-Romaine, and Galina Shatalina are co-authors of the Russian language textbook Golosa (Voices).
Evans-Romaine taught (2001-2003) at and directed (2004-2009) the Kathryn Wasserman Davis School of Russian at Middlebury College. Evans-Romaine also studies intersections between Russian literature and music. She has taught Russian at all levels, teaching methodology, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature and cultural history, and courses on literature and music.
Thomas Jesús Garza
Thomas Jesús Garza is an Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He teaches courses on Russian language, literature, and culture, including a course in Russian on the life and works of Vladimir Vysotsky.
During his 30-plus years at the UT-Austin, he has received numerous prizes for undergraduate and graduate teaching. He recently completed a book manuscript on filmic portraits of machismo in contemporary Russian and Mexican cultures and is currently working on a new project on Russian actor and bard, Vladimir Vysotsky in the Americas in the 1970s.
Stuart Goldberg
Stuart Goldberg is Associate Professor of Russian at Georgia Tech. He is author of Mandelstam, Blok and the Boundaries of Mythopoetic Symbolism (OSU Press, 2011, authorized translation NLO, 2020) and An Indwelling Voice: Sincerities and Authenticities in Russian Poetry (forthcoming, University of Toronto Press).
He was initiator and director of the Georgia Tech Critical Languages Song Project (clsp.gatech.edu), which offers one semester of advanced course materials in culture and language through the prism of song in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Russian.
Sumanth Gopinath
Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He has written or co-edited books on the ringtone industry (The Ringtone Dialectic, 2013), mobile music studies (The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, 2014), and the music of Steve Reich (Rethinking Reich, 2019).
His writings on Reich, minimalism, Marxism and music scholarship, sound and digital media, and country/folk music have appeared in various journals and edited collections. He is the leader of the independent Americana band The Gated Community.
Anastasia Gordienko
Anastasia Gordienko is Assistant Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at the University of Arizona. She is an author of Outlaw Music in Russia: The Rise of an Unlikely Genre (The UW Press, January 2023), which is the first full history of the shanson (Russian underworld music), from its tenuous ties to early modern criminals’ and robbers’ folk songs, through its immediate generic predecessors in the Soviet Union, including the bard song, to its current incarnation as the soundtrack for daily life in Russia.
In addition, this book investigates the shanson as it exists in popular culture today: celebrated for rather than divorced from its criminal undertones (or overtones), favored by the common people while simultaneously enjoying a quid pro quo relationship with Putin’s politics.
Bernadine Joselyn
Bernadine Joselyn is a Board Member of East-West Connections, a citizen diplomacy organization dedicated to fostering citizen diplomacy, understanding, and connections between the people of the United States, Russia, and the independent states of the former Soviet Union. Joselyn previously served as Director of Blandin Foundation’s Public Policy & Engagement Program.
A Minnesota native, Bernadine has a Master’s degree in international affairs and a certificate in advanced Soviet studies from Columbia University. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Minnesota and a Master’s degree in public policy from the University’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute. Bernadine served for seven years as a diplomat with the United States Department of State, including assignments in New Delhi, India and Moscow, Russia. She spent a decade living and working in Russia, where she was Director of the Moscow office of the Eurasia Foundation, and ran the Moscow office of the International Research and Exchanges Board.
Natalia Krylova
Natalia Krylova is a life-long educator and researcher with her diverse professional background spanning across both Russian and American academe. Her scholarship is mostly focused on the Russian Avant-Garde art, singer-songwriting tradition, and gender studies. Vladimir Vysotsky’s legacy has sparked her interest and imagination very early, in the Soviet era.
eventually generating a series of publications that explore such aspects of Vysotsky’s oeuvre as the “tavern” (kabak) tradition in his art, the specifics of his masculinity representation, and parallels between his artistic persona and the American songsmiths, such as Johnny Cash. Currently, she lives and works in Minneapolis (MN).
Todd Jeffery Lefko
Todd Jeffery Lefko is President of the United Filtration Company, an import-export firm dealing with water purification equipment, art, linen, kilns, and new technologies. He has worked in Russia for over 34 years and has homes in both Moscow and Minnesota. Todd is Chairperson of East-West Connections, an international non-profit focused on citizen diplomacy.
He has taught at the University of Minnesota and other Minnesota colleges, and has lectured at universities in Russia, Germany, China, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Todd is a Fellow for the Caux International Roundtable. Todd holds a BA in History, an MA in Public Administration and completed coursework for a Ph.D in Urban History from the University of Minnesota. He has studied Public Policy as a Bush Fellow at Harvard University, and Urban Planning at the University of Manchester, England. He is one of the Founders of Global Volunteers and has served as their Treasurer and Representative at the United Nations. Todd has also been a member of the Twin Cities Metropolitan Council, the Regional Transit Board and the Minnesota Experimental City Authority.
Paul Metsa
Paul Metsa is a legendary musician and songwriter from Minnesota. Born on the Iron Range, he has been based in Minneapolis since 1978. He has received seven Minnesota Music Awards and has played more than five thousand gigs, including forays to Iceland and Siberia.
He lives in Northeast Minneapolis with his faithful dog, Blackie; a dozen or so guitars; twenty-five orange crates of LPs; hundreds of books, compact discs, magazines, and vintage postcards; and several kitchen cupboards full of old cassette.
Anthony Qualin
Anthony Qualin is an Associate Professor of Russian language, literature, and culture at Texas Tech University. He has a PhD in Russian Literature from the University of Washington. His research interests include the works of Vladimir Vysotsky on which he has published articles in English and Russian. He is currently working on a book project about Vysotsky’s verse.
Dr. Qualin has also published on Russian rock poetry, Russian linguistics, and the Russophone literature of Central Asia. He has presented on Vysotsky’s works in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Voronezh, Krakow and many American cities.
Mary Lee Kortes
Singer/songwriter/Author Mary Lee Kortes, described by the New York Post as “one of the most compelling voices in modern rock,” rose to international acclaim when she released a complete, song-for-song recording of Bob Dylan‘s classic “Blood On The Tracks,” hailed by many critics as daring, and earning four stars from Rolling Stone for its “quietly direct magnificence….
Dylan likes this album so much he’s featured one of the tracks on his web site.” Her bold “Blood on the Tracks” adventure also led to Mary Lee’s Corvette opening for Dylan, and another wild romp: Mary Lee has just published a book titled “Dreaming of Dylan: 115 Dreams About Bob,” a visually stunning collection of dreams about Dylan from dreamers around the world—from plumbers to painters to Patti Smith.
Florence Dore
Dr. Florence Dore joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010, having earned her doctorate at UC Berkeley in 1999. She is a singer/songwriter and an academic, having published books and articles as well as released albums, and teaching in both the creative writing and literature programs at Carolina.
She has organized two public conferences on rock and literature, in 2017 at the National Humanities Center with the Carolina Performing Arts and in 2010 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. She sits on the advisory board for the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies at the University of Tulsa’s Bob Dylan Archive.
Michelle Massey
In her role as the Director of Public Programs and Marketing for the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Michelle Massey conceives and educates programs across a wide range of artistic mediums and forms, including visual arts, music, theater, dance, and literature. By making connections to the creative community and developing a track-record of collaboration with diverse partners, Massey fosters innovative programs that forge closer connections to the local community by increasing access, awareness, and appreciation of TMORA’s mission.
Vadim Astrakhan
Vadim Astrakhan (NJ) is a performer / translator, who’s made his life’s ambition to bring the works for Russia’s greatest singer / songwriter, Vladimir Vysotsky, to the English-speaking audience. He translates Vysotsky’s masterpieces into English, records them to new, modern music, and performs them live. He has already released three albums and is currently working on the fourth installment.
Vadim Astrakhan (NJ) is a performer / translator, who’s made his life’s ambition to bring the works for Russia’s greatest singer / songwriter, Vladimir Vysotsky, to the English-speaking audience. He translates Vysotsky’s masterpieces into English, records them to new, modern music, and performs them live. He has already released three albums and is currently working on the fourth installment. He has played successful shows in New York, Boston, DC, Pittsburgh, London, Edinburgh, Copenhagen, Moscow, and others.
Kirill Razumov
Kirill Razumov is an author, journalist, and member of the international Yachting Journalists’ Association (YJA). Since 2019, he has run “The Sea of Music”, a blog featuring interviews with prominent yachtsmen, musicians, and music historians about music, the sea, and their influence on each other. For this project he has interviewed a variety of notable figures including official ABBA biographer Carl Magnus Palm…
former head of Queen’s road crew Peter Hince and Uriah Heep founder Ken Hensley. Razumov has spent the last year researching Bob Dylan’s connections with Russia, and plans to publish a book based on the results.
Matt Steichen
Matt Steichen has been a Bob Dylan fan since he was seven years old. He’s worked in journalism and communications in the Twin Cities since 2006. He’s written and presented on the topic of Bob Dylan’s life and music to a variety of audiences. He’s a contributor to the upcoming book Bob Dylan in Minnesota: Troubadour Tales from Duluth, Hibbing and Dinkytown and was recently accepted as a presenter at The World of Bob Dylan symposium in Tulsa.
He will serve as keynote speaker at Duluth Dylan Fest in May. Steichen has seen Dylan in concert 50 times going back to 2000. He lives in Lakeville with his four sons and his wife, Jennifer, who he met at a Dylan concert in 2004.
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