Areas of Expertise:
- Literature, cinema, and culture of twentieth- and twenty-first century Russia
- Central Asian and East European cinema
- Media constructions of gender, ethnicity, and nationality
- Soviet national mythology in Stalinist, Thaw, and Putin-era cinema
- Post-socialist and postcolonial studies
Her scholarly interests are closely connected to the Caucasus, past and present, including Tsarist-era imperial ambitions, Soviet colonialism, and post-Soviet interethnic relations and conflict.
Elena investigates how this canonical narrative that both naturalizes the Russian presence in the Caucasus and explains the empire’s relations with its non-Russian subjects, has since been used to justify or question post-Soviet Russia’s political and cultural ambitions vis-à-vis her ethnic Others. Beyond Russia, Elena explores the ways in which post-Soviet Central Asian states restructure their relations with the former metropole and negotiate their hybrid post-socialist and postcolonial identities that span Soviet modernity, traditional ethnic customs, pre-Islamic spiritual beliefs, customary and fundamentalist Islam, Soviet-instilled secularism, nomadic pastoralism, and urbanization.
