His lifelong area of academic interest has been
Stalinist culture. He was awarded the Efim Etkind Prize for the best book about Russian Culture in 2012 and the AATSEEL Award for Outstanding Contributions to Scholarship in 2019. His book Late Stalinism was nominated for the
Pushkin House Book Prize.
Works
State Laughter: Stalinism, Populism, and Origins of Soviet Culture
Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics
"It's Just Letters on Paper…" Vladimir Sorokin: After Literature
Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures under Stalin: Institutions, Dynamics, Discourses
Russian literature since 1991
A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism: The Soviet Age and Beyond
The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature