About
I work as an open source/media analyst at Novetta, where my domain knowledge of Russian language and culture helps to make patterns in Russian and East European messaging meaningful and assess the contents and target audiences of adversarial messaging.
In research not directly related to my job, I specialize in twentieth-century Russian poetry, especially the early Soviet avant-garde and their successive work and successors under Socialist Realism. This interest in poetry also drives a agenda of developing computational methods to facilitate the study of versification and quantitative poetics. I also enjoy the opportunity to examine other media, particularly film, as can be seen in my notes and reviews on contemporary film for the annual Pittsburgh Russian Film Symposium and Kinokultura. Education
Ph.D. Russian Literature, University of Pittsburgh, 2016
B.A. Russian Studies, College of William & Mary, 2006 Publications
- Peer-Reviewed
- Birnbaum, David J., and Elise Thorsen. “Markup and meter: Using XML
tools to teach a computer to think about versification.” Presented
at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2015, Washington, DC, August 11 –
14, 2015. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference
2015. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 15
(2015). doi:10.4242/BalisageVol15.Birnbaum01.
- Book Reviews
- Review of Svitlana Malykhina’s Renaissance of Classical
Allusions in Contemporary Russian Media. In Slavic and
Eastern European Journal (forthcoming)
- Review of Nila Friedberg’s English Rhythms in Russian Verse: On
the Experiment of Joseph Brodsky. With David J. Birnbaum.
Language 90.3 (September 2014): 765-767.
- Review of Nariman Skakov’s The Cinema of Tarkovsky: Labyrinths
of Space and Time. In Slavic and East European Journal 57.1
(Spring 2013): 127-128.
- Review of Jamie Miller’s Soviet Cinema: Politics and Persuasion
under Stalin. In Slavic and East European Journal
55.1 (Spring 2011): 125-27.
- Film Reviews and Program Notes
Memberships
Association for the Advancement of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Association for Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages