Michael Kunichika

Michael Kunichika teaches at Amherst College, where he is an Associate Professor in the Russian Department and a contributing faculty member of the Program in Film and Media Studies. He also directs the college’s Center for Russian Culture, and serves on the advisory boards of Film and Media Studies and the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst. His book “Our Native Antiquity”: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Culture of Russian Modernism (2015) received an honorable mention for the ASEEES Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize in 2016; it was also short-listed for the best book prize in cultural studies for AATSEEL. Kunichika’s research focuses primarily on Russian and Soviet modernism, critical theory, and cinema studies. His work has appeared in such journals as Ab Imperio, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, and RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics. Support for his research has come from the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies (Harvard) and the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ). He graduated from Reed College (Portland, OR) in Russian, and then received his Ph.d. from the University of California, Berkeley in Slavic Languages and Literatures.