Dr. 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 has recently completed her Ph.D. 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).
She is the author of "Tracing the Effects of Soviet Gender and Sexual Politics in Central Asia," published in Central Asian Affairs (2022). Her article on "Queering the Soviet Pribaltika: Criminal cases of consensual sodomy in Soviet Latvia (1960s-1980s)" was published as a part of Decolonizing Queer Experience LGBT+ Narratives from Eastern Europe and Eurasia (2020). She is also a co-author of "The Ukrainian-Russian Virtual Flashmob against Sexual Assault" with Janet Johnson, published in The Journal of Social Policy Studies (2018).
