Biography

Pavel Khazanov defended his PhD dissertation in Comparative Literature and Russian at the University of Pennsylvania  in the summer of 2017. He also holds an MA in Philosophy from the Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy (London, UK), and a BA in English from UCLA (Los Angeles, CA).
Pavel’s dissertation, ‘Russia Eternal: Recalling the Imperial Era in Late- and Post-Soviet Literature and Culture’, examines contemporary Russian culture’s engagement with the history and memory of the pre-Soviet era.
During his tenure as a Max Weber Fellow, he will use the materials gathered for his dissertation to write several articles and prepare a monograph, tentatively titled ‘A Russia That We Have Lost: The History and Politics of Recalling the Pre-Soviet Past’. This book will tell the untold story of how inventive recollections of the pre-Revolutionary past allowed core elements of late Soviet society to define themselves and articulate a political horizon that ended up shaping the cultural discourse of the post-Soviet era.He will also refract Russia’s cultural developments against current theorizations of history and memory in post-War Europe, as well as theorizations of nostalgia and the ‘retro’ in capitalist societies. Lastly, he will contextualize Russia’s social dynamics as part of today’s global trend, in which political agendas are being shaped by recollections of the past, rather than hopes for the future.As a PhD candidate at Penn Pavel taught survey courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature and culture, as well as Russian language courses.