Alexandra Urakova

Johan Peter Falck Fellow, SCAS.
Senior Researcher, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature, Russian Academy of Sciences,
Moscow

Alexandra Urakova completed her PhD in American Literature at the Moscow State University in
2005. Ever since her graduate years, she has been working as a Research Fellow at the A.M. Gorky
Institute of World Literature and has taught at major Russian universities, including Moscow State
University, Russian State University for the Humanities, and the Higher School of Economics. In
2007-2008, she had a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Virginia, followed by research
fellowships in Berlin and London. More recently, she has held the titles Senior Core Fellow at IAS
CEU Budapest and Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.

Urakova’s primary field of expertise is American literature. She has published a book entitled ‘The
Poetics of the Body in the Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe’(2009, in Russian), edited the collection
Deciphering Poe: Subtexts, Contexts, Subversive Meanings (Lehigh University Press, 2013), and
published numerous essays and chapters on nineteenth-century American literature, including a
chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe (2019).

At the same time, her research has a wider comparative and interdisciplinary scope. Among the books
she co-edited are ‘Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky: Splendors and Miseries of National Genius’ (2017, in
Russian) and ‘Literary Cult as a Phenomenon of Contemporary Literary Process: Author, Text, Reader’
(2011, in Russian). Currently, she is a co-editing a multi-disciplinary volume entitled The Dangers of Gifts
from Antiquity to the Digital Age (Routledge, forthcoming).

At SCAS, Urakova will be exploring languages, literatures and ideologies of the so-called “modern” gift,
with a special focus on North America and Europe. Her work will address the nineteenth-century history
of the gift in a literary and comparative perspective.


This information is accurate as of the academic year 2020-21.