Alex Pekov
Graduate Assistant
ap3543@columbia.edu
Alex is a 6th-year PhD candidate in Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature at Columbia. He holds a BA (diploma with distinction) in Philosophy from Moscow State University Lomonosov and an MA in Slavic and Jewish Studies from Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. He is also a recipient of Graduate Certificate in Feminist Scholarship at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. His dissertation Toward a Transmediterranean Genealogy: Matrilineal Legacies in Sephardi Women Writers from the Former Yugoslavia and the Maghreb, focuses on the contemporary autofictional family novels, crafted in French and Serbian by the women writers of Jewish Sephardi origin, born in the French-ruled Maghreb and ex-Yugoslavia, respectively. Alex’s broader research interests include ex-Yugoslav literatures, Francophone belles lettres, Jewish lifeworlds & Jewish difference, the Shoah & pornotroping, multilingualism & decolonization, autofiction & life-writing, genocide & gynocide, postmemory, colonial regimes of desire, colonial photography, gay male physique photography, visual representations of gay masculinities, queer diasporic communities. In the academic year 2021-2022, Alex also serves as a Teaching Observation Fellow at the Center for Teaching and Learning and teaches Second-Year (Intermediate) Russian in the Department of Slavic Languages.
Alex assists the CSSD with social media and weekly digest updates.