Julie Cassiday’s latest book, Russian Style: Performing Gender, Power and Putinism, is among the six books shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2024.
In her book, Cassiday, the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian, explores how heteronormativity and homophobia have become hallmarks of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Hailed by reviewers as “well conceived, researched and executed” and “an entertaining work of scholarship,” the book also shines light on how a counterculture has emerged in popular culture—TV, art, music, radio, podcasts, social media and advertising—to resist Putin’s power and values.
At Williams since 1994, Cassiday’s research areas include performance studies and gender and sexuality studies in Russian culture. She teaches courses on Russian language, Russian and Soviet culture, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. She has published extensively on topics ranging from Putin’s love of expensive kitsch to pop culture critiques of contemporary Russian gender roles.
Cassiday is also the author of The Enemy on Trial: Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen (2017) and co-editor of Russian Performances: Word, Object, Action (2018).
Published April 10, 2024