2020-2021 Graduate Researcher
2020 Graduate Fellow
Alexander Jacobson is a third-year Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. His thesis, entitled “Weaponized Works: The Russian Book of the 1960s and 1970s,” explores the myriad, yet systematic forms characteristic of Russian volumes from this era, both within the USSR and abroad. He is interested in how both Soviet and “tamizdat” publishers wrestled with the multi-dimensional character of the book-object, marrying pliant texts to physical forms and paratextual apparatuses crafted for concrete goals.
In his work with the Center for Digital Humanities, Alexander plans to use Knizhnaia letopis’, the national bibliography of the USSR, to create a dataset containing print-run numbers [tirazhi] for every book published within the USSR.