E-Mail: Ekaterina-Lapina-Kratasyuk

Ekaterina Lapina-Kratasyuk, Ph.D,. is a professor in Russian State University for the Humanities (RGGU, Moscow, Russia) and a senior researcher in Russian Institute for Culturology (RIK, Moscow, Russia). She is also a part of international HESP challenge seminar “Visual Studies of Immedia: Exploring postmodern immediacy of mass media” (2007-2009) and a member of editorial board of Russian CyberSpace.org. Her researcher’s as well as teaching interests are connected with media studies, history and theory of cinema, Internet studies and cultural sociology. Most significant of her publications are dedicated to the constructing of “Reality” in TV and Internet news, sociological analysis of commercials, representation of Past in popular culture. The topic of the actual research is connected with images and meanings of “Science” in mass media.

Publications relevant to the topic:

• Construction of “Reality” in Russian Mass Media: News on Television and in the Internet // "Control + Shift. Public and Private Usages of the Russian Internet" / Henrike Schmidt, Katy Teubener, Natalja Konradova (Eds.) Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2006.
  
• A man from TV audience in news programs of contemporary Russian TV // Media culture of new Russia. Ekaterinburg, 2007.
  
• ‘Family Album’ and Recipes for Happiness: Images of the Ideal Family in Russian TV Commercials and Glossy Magazines // Kultura. 2006. N 6 (June). http://www.forschungsstelle-osteuropa.de/con/images/stories/pdf/kultura/kultura_6_2006_EN.pdf
  
• Russian History in TV commercials: to have or to be? // AB IMPERIO. Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space. 2006, Nr. 1.
  

E-Mail: Ellen Rutten
Web:  www.ellenrutten.nl

Studied Russian literature and culture at the Universities of Groningen (NL), St. Petersburg and Humboldt University Berlin. PhD, University of Groningen. Worked as affiliated lecturer in Russian literature and philosophy at the Universities of Amsterdam and Leiden.

Currently research associate at Cambridge University for ‘Reclaiming the Reader: Neo-Sentimentalist Tendencies in Contemporary Russian Literature’ – a 2-year research project funded by the Netherlands Scientific Organization. Since 2007 co-convener of the CRASSH Study Group of Contemporary Russian Culture. Contributing editor of contemporary design and architecture magazines Frame and Mark Magazine and museum/art blog N8.

Relevant publications:

• "Strategic Sentiments. 'New Sincere' Tendencies in Contemporary Russian Literature". In: Dutch Contributions to the Fourteenth International Congress of Slavists, Amsterdam 2008 (in press)

E-Mail: Robert A. Saunders
Web: http://www.farmingdale.edu/~saunder/index.html
Blog: http://neo-cognoscenti.blogspot.com/

Robert A. Saunders (PhD in Global Affairs, Rutgers University) is an
Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Economics & Politics at
Farmingdale State College, a campus of the State University of New York.
His research explores the interplay between nationalism, minority identity,
and global politics. He is currently completing his manuscript entitled The
Web of Identity: Minority Nationalism and Ethnopolitics in Cyberspace
(Berghahn Books). Based on his extensive work on Kazakhstan's feud with the
British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, Harper's labeled him the 'world's
leading Boratologist' in 2006. His forthcoming book on the subject is
entitled The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen: Politics, Parody, and the
Battle over Borat (Lexington Books, 2008). His next project is the Historical
Dictionary of Contemporary Russia to be co-authored with Vlad Strukov.

Publications relevant to the topic:

• "New Media, New Russians, New Abroad: The Evolution of Minority Russian
  Identity in Cyberspace," The Post-Soviet Russian Media: Power, Change and
  Conflicting Messages, edited by Birgit Beumers, Stephen Hutchings & Natalya
  Rulyova, Routledge (forthcoming, 2009).
  
• "Digital Dragons and Cybernetic Bears: Comparing the Overseas Chinese and
  Near Abroad Russian Web Communities," Nationalism & Ethnic Politics,
  co-authored with Sheng Ding, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Summer 2006).
  
• "Denationalized Digerati in the Virtual Near Abroad: The Paradoxical Impact
  of the Internet on National Identity among Minority Russians," Global Media
  and Communication, Vol. 2, No. 1 (April 2006).
  
• "A Web of Postnational Identities: National Minorities, Identity Politics,
  and Cyberspace" in Cul'tura "Post": At the Crossroads of Cultures and
  Civilizations, edited by Maria K. Popova and Vladimir V. Stroukov, Voronezh
  State University Press (2004).
  

E-Mail: Henrike Schmidt
Web:  http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/schmidt.html

Henrike Schmidt studied Slavic Literatures, History and Economics in Bonn, Köln and St. Petersburg. Her PhD thesis (2000) was dedicated to intermedial conceptions of poetic language in Russian poetry of the 20th century. She is especially interested in media studies, contemporary Russian poetry, and Bulgarian Literature. Since 2004 she has been participating in international Distance Learning courses. She is currently employed at the Peter Szondi-Institute for comparative literature, Free University Berlin, where she is preparing a book on Russian Literatur on the Internet.

Publications relevant to the topic (English and Russian):

• 'Krasavica i chudovišce’. K voprosu o vzaimootnoshenij gosudarstva i setevogo soobshchestva v Rossii. In: Ajmermacher, Karl / Bordjugov, Gennadij / Grabowsky, Ingo: Kul’tura i vlast’ v uslovijach kommunikacionnoj revoljucii XX veka, Moskva 2002, pp. 348-357.
  
• Poeticeskaja (ne)dvizhimost’. Digital’naja poezija v russkoj seti. In: Russian Literature LVII (2005), pp. 423-440
  
• „Virtual (re)unification? Diasporic Culture(s) on the Russian Internet “. In: Media Studies / Studia Medioznawcze Nr 3 (22) 2005, Warszawa 2005, pp. 132-148. (together with Katy Teubener und Nils Zurawski)
  
• Control + Shift. Public and Private Usages of the Russian Internet. Henrike Schmidt, Katy Teubener, Natalja Konradova (Eds.). BOD-Verlag: Norderstedt, 2006. Online available on this website.
  
• Spam kak allegorija musora i poeticheskoj muzy. In: Topos. Literaturno-filosofskij zhurnal (14.07.2006), <http://www.topos.ru/article/4817>
  
• Postprintium? The aesthetics of digital literary samizdat. In: Jessie Labov / Friederike Kind (Eds.): From Samizdat to Tamizdat: Dissident Media out of Central Eastern Europe after 1945, 2008, in print.

Web:  http://static.londonconsortium.com

Dr Vlad Strukov lives in London and teaches Russian literature, media and film at the University of Leeds, UK. He is also associate faculty in the Centre for World Cinemas where he teaches digital culture. His publications on Russian internet art have appeared in Slavic and Eastern European Journal and Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal. He has presented on Russian culture and internet at the BBC World Service and at the Universities of Birmingham, Cambridge, London, Oxford and Pittsburgh. He is the founding editor of Static, an international web journal for interdisciplinary debate about paradoxes of contemporary culture. He is a film and animation curator. He is at present working on a project that deals with the issues of digital and web-induced arts, space, authorship and film.

• “Russia’s Internet Media Policies: Open Space and Ideological Closure”
  In Mass-Media in Post-Soviet Russia, edited by B. Beumers, S. Hutchings and N. Rulyova.
  London: Routledge, forthcoming 2009
• “Video Anekdot: Auteurs and Voyeurs of Russian Flash Animation”
  In Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, SAGE Publication, UK, Volume 2, No 2; July 2007
• “The Performativity of Fear: Andrei Bakhurin’s Flash Animation”
  In Static, UK, October, 2005
• “Masiania, or Reimagining the Self in the Cyberspace of Rusnet”
  In Slavic and East European Journal, USA, Volume 48, No. 3; 2004; p. 438-461.
  

Karina Alexanyan is a PhD candidate in Communications at Columbia
University, New York. Her doctoral research centers on the “role of
global communication technologies in cultural globalization” with a focus on Russian-language Internet users. She is currently working with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University on Mapping the Russian Language Blogosphere. Most recently, she organized the “Russia Online”
conference at Columbia University.

Alexanyan received her M.Phil.from Columbia University, has an M.A.in Communication from NYU and a B.A. in Linguistics and Modern Languages (French and Russian) from the Claremont Colleges.

Relevant Publications:

• “Blogging in Russia is not Russian Blogging” in “International Blogging – Identity, Politics and Networked Publics”, edited by Russel and Echchaibi (Peter Lang, in press)

E-Mail: Sudha Rajagopalan

Sudha Rajagopalan is Affiliated Researcher with the Media Studies Group (Institute of History and Culture) at the University of Utrecht. Originally from Bombay, she completed her Ph.D in Russian History at Indiana University, Bloomington (USA) in 2005. Her doctoral research was an ethno-historical study of Indian cinema’s reception in the Soviet Union, where that reception constituted a ‘zone of debate’ and negotation between the aesthetic preferences of movie-goers, institutional actors and cultural mediators in Soviet movie culture after Stalin. Her research interests are in Soviet and post-Soviet popular culture, media reception, sites of leisure and intersections of old and new media on Runet. She is currently starting a new project on Russian fan sites for science fiction, magic and occult television shows, in the larger context of post-Soviet ‘popular knowledges’ such as conspiracy theories and urban legends.

She has also worked as a research assistant at the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde (Leiden) and is a freelance journalist with the digital publication, ‘Power of Culture’ (Amsterdam).

Relevant publications:

• Indian Films in Soviet Cinemas: the Culture of Movie-Going after Stalin
  (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming 2008)

• (Original South Asian imprint)
  Leave Disco Dancer Alone!: Indian Cinema and Soviet Movie-Going after Stalin (New Delhi: Yoda Press, February 2008).

E-Mail: Katy Teubener
Web :  http://www.weltweiterwiderstand.de

Katy Teubener studied Sociology, Philosophy and German Literature at the University of Münster/Germany, where she received her PhD in 2002 for a hypertext print publication on the Internet’s impact on society. She has been involved in research projects on culture and new media at different faculties and universities for many years, being especially interested in questions on the structural transformation of the public sphere brought about by modern communication technologies and, as an overall issue, innovative forms of Internet-based communication and co-operation in national as well as international teaching and research. She is currently engaged in developing Distance learning courses on issues considered essential for the survival in the globalized labour market of today, such as international networking, creativity, self-motivation or personal branding. (for more information see  (W)elt (W)eiter (W)iderstand)

E-Mail: Nils Zurawski
Web:  http://www.uni-muenster.de/PeaCon/zurawski/

Nils Zurawski, studied Sociology, Ethnology and Geography at the University of Münster/Germany, MA (1994) in Sociology, Dr. phil (1999) “Virtual Ethnicity. Studies on Identity, Culture and the Internet" (Frankfurt/M, Peter Lang 2000); between Aug. 2000 and July 2001 field research in Northern Ireland reseraching on “Violence and Identity"; from 2001 to 2003 work as a news editor for a public broadcasting company (NDR); currently engaged in a  research project on “CCTV and spatial perceptions" (start October 2003) and participating in the research group on identity performance on the Russian Internet (more  information).