The International Institute for Film Science and Art (IIFSA) is honored to announce that Leah M. Feldman, Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, has been officially elected as an IIFSA Fellow. This honor not only recognizes her outstanding contributions to the fields of literary and cultural studies but also signifies IIFSA's deepened expansion into interdisciplinary film research.

Academic Trajectory: Cultural Decoding from Literature to Film   

Associate Professor Feldman's research centers on the "poetic-political" entanglements of global literature and culture, with deep engagement in translation theory, semiotics, Marxist aesthetics, and anti-colonial theory, particularly focusing on cultural discourse practices in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Her book Thresholds of Eurasia: Orientalism and Revolutionary Aesthetics in the Caucasus* (Cornell University Press, 2018) analyzes the interaction between Orientalist and anti-colonial narratives in Russian and Azerbaijani literature from a groundbreaking perspective. Awarded the Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Prize, it provides a new paradigm for the study of empire, modernity, and anti-colonialism.

It is worth noting that her current research, tentatively titled Feeling Collapse, focuses on the cinema, art, and performances of Central Asia and the Caucasus during the period of the Soviet Empire's disintegration, decoding the collective experiences of epochal transformation through cultural texts. This project uses film as a carrier of cultural memory and political expression, deeply exploring the aesthetic value and social significance of Soviet cinema within transregional and cross-civilizational contexts. It highly aligns with IIFSA’s mission of "cross-cultural research on film science and art," injecting dual vitality of literary theory and postcolonial perspectives into film history research.

Academic Influence: A Cross-Disciplinary Knowledge Bridge   

Associate Professor Feldman's research has been published in top-tier journals such as Slavic Review and Boundary 2, and as a member of the editorial team of *Boundary 2*, she continues to foster dialogue in cross-cultural research. Her work spans not only literature, film, and political philosophy but also employs translation studies and close textual reading as methodologies to uncover the obscured "film-literature" intertextuality in the cultural fabric of Eurasia (such as the symbiotic relationship between Soviet cinema and Central Asian/Caucasian literature). This provides a solid theoretical foundation for IIFSA’s research pillar of "Film and Global Culture."

New Opportunities for IIFSA: In-Depth Dialogue Between Film and Literature  

 As an IIFSA Fellow, Associate Professor Feldman will take the film culture and politics of the Soviet disintegration period as a starting point to integrate comparative literature and film studies, exploring the following directions:   

Film as a Visual Expression of Anti-Colonial Discourse (Imperial memory and identity reconstruction in Central Asian/Caucasian cinema);   

The Expansion of Film Semiotics through Literary Theory (Critical interpretation of Marxist aesthetics and film narrative);   

Innovation in the Paradigm of Writing Transregional Film History (Reassessing Eurasian film heritage from the perspective of Soviet cosmopolitanism).   

 Her joining will advance IIFSA's breakthroughs in frontier fields such as "film and Global South cultures"and "post-imperial film studies", infusing the institute with the incisive perspective of literary criticism and the profound accumulation of cross-civilizational research.