Anastasia Kayiatos

Image of Anastasia Kayiatos.

Anastasia Kayiatos

Type
Dissertation Fellow
Department
Slavic Languages & Literatures
2010-11

In “Silence and Alterity in Russia after Stalin, 1955-1975,” Anastasia Kayiatos (Slavic Languages & Literatures) explores the conditions of speech and speechlessness under which the Soviet Union’s “others”—those marginalized by bodily differences of sexuality, gender, race, and disability—came to be as subjects and came together as socialites within late socialism. Ms. Kayiatos' dissertation project works against the Cold War repressive hypothesis that all Soviet citizens were returned to speech after Stalin, and instead investigates how artistic speech was politically impeded and how impeded speech was artistically represented in Russian culture at the time. Analyzing such styles of “silence” as censorship; pantomime; deaf theater; racially-inflected speech; speech pathology described by the clinical-pedagogical discipline of Defectology; and periphrastic poetics in queer and “women’s prose,” Ms. Kayiatos offsets stories of suppressed and strained speech with the counter conduct—that is, creative re/appropriations of silences—performed by some Soviet actors.

Anastasia Kayiatos is the recipient of the 2010-2011 Jacobson Award.