Philip Gleissner specializes in the cultures and literatures of socialist Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on print media in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR. He is particularly interested in media as agents of mobility: mechanisms that facilitate the transnational circulation of cultural forms within and beyond Eastern and East Central Europe.

Gleissner’s monograph Subscribing to Sovietdom: The Lives of the Socialist Literary Journal is forthcoming with University of Toronto Press and was awarded the First Book Subvention of the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. His edited volume Resilient Kitchens: American Immigrant Cooking in a Time of Crisis (Rutgers University Press, 2023) has been nominated for a 2024 James Beard Media Award. 

Professor Gleissner’s research relies on digital humanities methodology as a tool for the critical exploration of culture for the project Soviet Journals Reconnected. His current project Kvir_Izdat is an attempt to rethink digital humanities work from a queer perspective. 

Gleissner teaches a variety of classes on Soviet and Central European culture, film, and literature and is available to advise undergraduate research, dissertations, and to serve on MA and dissertation committees.

Upcoming Classes:

AU 2024 | Slavic 3320: Queer Comrades, Sexual Citizenship and LGBTQ Lives in Eastern Europe (General education course, Citizenship Theme)

AU 2024 | Slavic 4530: Hacking Slavic Literatures: Literary Analysis in the Digital Age (Required for Russian major)

SP 2025 | Slavic 3320: Queer Comrades, Sexual Citizenship and LGBTQ Lives in Eastern Europe (General education course, Citizenship Theme)

SP 2025 | Independent Study/Research Internship: The Right to Write: Documenting Minoritized Literatures and Cultures in Russia (with Dr. Dima Arzyutov)

Books:

Gleissner, Philip, and Bradley A. Gorski, eds. Red Migrations: Transnational Mobility and Leftist Culture after 1917. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2024.

Together with a new political, social, and cultural order, the Bolshevik Revolution also brought about a spatial revolution. Changed patterns, motivations, and impacts of migration collided with new cultural forms and aesthetic mandates. Red Migrations highlights the various multidirectional and multilateral transnational movements of leftist thinkers, artists, and writers.

The book draws on avant-garde poets such as David Burliuk, Marxist theoreticians such as János Mácza, and “fellow travellers” such as Langston Hughes, revealing how leftists of all stripes were inspired and at times impelled by the Soviet Revolution to cross borders. It explores how the resulting circulation of ideas, aesthetic forms, and individuals not only contributed enormously to the ferment of creative activity in the early Soviet years, but also deeply informed international leftist aesthetics and political practice throughout the twentieth century.

The robust and diverse transnational networks created by these circulations are at the centre of this volume. With original archival research and insightful analyses, Red Migrations sheds light on the ideals, aspirations, and disappointments of leftist transnationalism from the 1920s through the 1960s and the aesthetic forms they engendered.

Gleissner, Philip, and Harry Eli Kashdan, eds. Resilient Kitchens: American Immigrant Cooking in a Time of Crisis, Essays and Recipes. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2023. 

Immigrants have left their mark on the great melting pot of American cuisine, and they have continued working hard to keep America’s kitchens running, even during times of crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. For some immigrant cooks, the pandemic brought home the lack of protection for essential workers in the American food system. For others, cooking was a way of reconnecting with homelands they could not visit during periods of lockdown. 

Resilient Kitchens: American Immigrant Cooking in a Time of Crisis is a stimulating collection of essays about the lives of immigrants in the United States before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, told through the lens of food. It includes a vibrant mix of perspectives from professional food writers, restaurateurs, scholars, and activists, whose stories range from emotional reflections on hardship, loss, and resilience to journalistic investigations of racism in the American food system. Each contribution is accompanied by a recipe of special importance to the author, giving readers a taste of cuisines from around the world. Every essay is accompanied by gorgeous food photography, the authors’ snapshots of pandemic life, and hand-drawn illustrations by Filipino American artist Angelo Dolojan. 

Wachtel, Michael, and Philip Gleissner, eds. Vjačeslav Ivanov und seine deutschsprachigen Verleger: Eine Chronik in Briefen. [Viacheslav Ivanov and His German-Language Publishers. A Chronicle of Correspondence.] Wien: Peter Lang, 2019.

Der Band beleuchtet die Beziehung des Dichters Vjačeslav Ivanov (1866–1949) zu den Verlagen J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) und Benno Schwabe im Zeitraum 1928–1949. Der Briefwechsel enthält an die 300 größtenteils erstmalig edierten Zeugnisse. Daraus ergeben sich zahlreiche Informationen zu Ivanovs Leben und Werk, zur Geschichte des deutschsprachigen Verlagswesens und zur russischen Exilkultur. Die Archivalien spiegeln die Beteiligung von Literaten und Übersetzern wie Martin Kaubisch, Stephan Kuttner, Edwin Landau, Käthe Rosenberg, Evsej Schor, Fedor Stepun an der Vermittlung der Werke Ivanovs wider. Ferner werden auch Rezensionen zu Ivanovs Werk von Hans Barth, Alfred Bem, Heinrich Fels, Fred Höntzsch, Emil Medtner und Friedrich Muckermann erstmals gesammelt und wiederabgedruckt.

Articles and book chapters:

“Desiring the USSR: Writers from Two Germanies in the Soviet Contact Zone.” (in Red Migrations volume, 2024)

“‘Somehow, I Wasn’t Drawn into the Editorial Office of Novyi Mir’: Digital Approaches to the Literary Environment of Late Socialist Journals.” Russian Literature 122-123 (2021), pp. 163-191.

“Bibliografinen data ja tekstien liikkeet rautaesiripun läpi [Bibliographical Data and the Migration of Texts Through the Iron Curtain].” Idäntutkimus. The Finnish Review of East European Studies 26.3 (2019), pp. 77-90.

“Soviet Union on the Seine: Kontinent, Sintaksis, and the Social Life of Émigré Journals.” Russian Review 77. 3 (2018), pp. 446 -469.

“Periodical Studies: Why and How to Re-read East European Journals.” ASEEES NewsNet 56.1 (2016), pp. 11-12. (co-authored with Natalia Ermolaev)

“‘Будто голая я, а не героиня вашего фильма’: Скандалы ‘порноноваторства’ времен перестройки [As If the Naked One Was Me: The ‘Pornonovation’ Scandals of the Perestroika Era].” Новое литературное обозрение [New Literary Observer] 129 (2014), pp. 80-107.

Digital projects:

The Covid Food Archive. Public digital humanities project. This community archive of food memories from the pandemic was first developed as an Omeka site by Harry Eli Kashdan and Philip Gleissner in October 2020. In 2022, the visual interface was collaboratively redesigned after user testing together with the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design at Ohio State, based on a grant from the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme at Ohio State. The project continues to be open for community submissions and research.

Kvir_Izdat. Index of post-Soviet queer publishing, consisting of datasets of contribution-level bibliographical entries that document periodicals published in the 1990s and early 2000s.  Started in March 2021 and currently in progress. Project consists of companion website and Github data repository. The latter is currently not publicly accessible due to security concerns.

Soviet Journals Reconnected. Dataset of Soviet 1960s periodicals metadata, available through Github data repository, including documentation and tutorials for data cleaning. 

Digital Émigré. Metadata collection of the periodicals Kontinent (1974-2013) and Sintaksis (1978-2001) for the years 1974-1992, available through Github data repository, including documentation and tutorials for data cleaning.