Feruza Aripova (she/her) is a Lecturer of Modern Russian History at the Lehman College, CUNY. She is a Center Associate and a co-chair of the Gender, Socialism and post-Socialism group at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Feruza recently completed her PhD in World History at Northeastern University. Her doctoral dissertation, titled "Fifty shades of Vice: Decolonizing the Soviet homophobic legacy," sought to explore and map the impact of colonial, legal and medical perceptions of same-sex desire on contemporary state policies and public opinion in Russia and its former Eastern and Western borderlands (Central Asian and Baltic republics).