Teaching is one of my strongest passions and my own research always goes hand in hand with my work with students. The collected volume Socrates in Russia (Brill 2022) initially grew out of an undergraduate course I designed and taught at Princeton University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Pittsburgh. This course, titled “Philosophy and Literature: Western Thought and the Slavic Dialogic Imagination,” opens with the Ukrainian philosopher Gregory Skovoroda’s philosophical fragment “Socrates in Russia” and his Platonic dialogue “A Conversation Among Five Travelers Concerning Life’s True Happiness,” which the students perform and reenact in class. Last year, at ASEEES in Washington, DC, I presented this methodology for “A Performance Showcase of Creative Research,” titled “From the Footnotes to the Footlights.”
   The course “Philosophy and Literature: Western Thought and the Slavic Dialogic Imagination” laid the foundation of the Socrates in Russia. This volume explores the influence of the Socratic legacy in the Russian, East European, and Soviet contexts. For writers, philosophers, and artists, Socrates has served as a potent symbol—of the human capacity for philosophical reflection, as well as the tumultuous (and often dangerous) reality in which Russian-speaking and Soviet intellectuals found themselves. The thirteen chapters include surveys of historical periods and movements (the 18th century, Nietzscheanism, and the “Greek Renaissance” of Russian culture), studies of individual writers and philosophers (Skovoroda, Herzen, Dostoevsky, Rozanov, Bely, Narbut, and many others), and investigations of Socratic subtexts (e.g., in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita and Nosov’s Neznaika series for children). The volume concludes with a “Socratic Texts” section of new translations Alyssa DeBlasio and I completed, including Tolstoy’s biographies of Gregory Skovoroda and his “The Greek teacher Socrates.” The plurality of these topics demonstrates the continued relevance of the Socratic myth not only for Russian-speaking culture, but for the world. The Socrates in Russia volume has resulted in several additional collaborative projects. Our next volume, titled Socratic Women, which considers women writers, thinkers, and philosophers, as well as female characters in Russian literature, who could be seen as possible reincarnations of such figures as Diotima of Mantinea, Aspasia of Miletus, and Socrates himself. We see this project as addressing a broader need in our field to complement text-centric studies with figure-studies. This opens a space for diversity, in that women and other marginalized figures in the 19th century were not necessarily the producers of texts but were certainly the producers of ideas.
    My commitment to interdisciplinarity underlies both my teaching and research agenda. Currently, in addition to four levels of Russian at Johns Hopkins University, including an advanced seminar “Readings in Russian Studies,” I am teaching a new content course of my own design titled ‘Disciplines Without Borders:’ Multidisciplinarity in Literature, Art, and Sciences. This introductory course explores the intersections between literary texts, scientific discoveries, and art. We study Geometry, Calculus, Probability Theory, Philosophy, Cognitive Science, Medicine, and Ecology in Russian Literature. We read novels, poems, and plays by Goethe, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Akhmatova, and Nabokov, among others, with relevant chapters from The Mathematical Mind of F. M. Dostoevsky: Imaginary Numbers, Non-Euclidean Geometry, and Infinity by Michael Marsh-Soloway; Russian Literature and Cognitive Science edited by Tom Dolack; Medical Storyworlds: Health, Illness, and Bodies in Russian and European Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Elena Fratto, among others. We will also have guest lecturers from the departments of philosophy, mathematics, and cognitive science as we consider philosophy as science and science as art and explore multidisciplinarity and the many ways in which sciences can transform our understanding of art and literature and vice versa.
 My research interests include German Idealism and Russian Realism, nineteenth-century Russian literature, the Faustian legacy in Russia and Eastern Europe, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, aesthetics, philosophy of emotion and cognition in literature, the theory of the novel, Bakhtin, theater, poetry, and translation. My expertise in the literatures and cultures of other Slavic and Eurasian peoples includes Armenian as well as Ukrainian. I have published and lectured on Ukrainian dissident movements at New York University and Sacramento Historical Society. I have travelled extensively in Ukraine and have conducted research and interviews at the Literature Museum of Odessa, the Philosophy Department of Odessa National University, Museum of Dissident Movement in Kiev, and the Parajanov Art Center. Among Armenian thinkers and writers, I am particularly interested in Hovhannes Tumanyan, Zabel Yesayan, and Valery Brusov’s translations of Armenian poetry into Russian, which include Sayat-Nova’s poems and songs, also immortalized in Sergei Parajanov’s masterpiece The Color of Pomegranates.
  Building inclusive communities has been central to my teaching and research. As an immigrant from Armenia and Russia, I understand personally the difficulty of navigating a majoritarian culture for someone from the outside. I had to do this in my teenage years as an immigrant in Russia, and then again in my twenties as a first-generation immigrant in the United States. As someone who has had to find her voice in three very different cultures, I am especially sensitive to questions of gender, racism, and otherness. My teaching is therefore inherently intercultural and inclusive: I try to show and help students understand how the act of communication (reading, writing, speaking) and art can bridge gaps between humans of radically different worlds. I am committed to participating in and helping to build a diverse curriculum that recognizes the complex realities and legacies of the Russian language throughout Eastern Europe and the Caucasus.
   Despite all this, not only is basic survival in academia becoming increasingly difficult both financially and physically but the student use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is adding insult to injury. It is extremely disheartening when as a teacher you spend hours and weeks of your life developing particular research topics and/or creative projects for each student, and then some of them turn in AI generated papers or presentations, which you know have taken them no more than 5 to 10 minutes. Usually, these are the same students who later complain even about such generous grades as an A (yes, they want an A+!), A-, or B+. Moreover, some of them allow themselves to write the most disrespectful and insulting comments in their anonymous student evaluations as if they are reviewing a robot or a machine rather than a human being who has poured their blood and sweat and decades of research into educating them. I have been too spoiled with stellar student evaluations over my 15 years of teaching all over the US and the world. So, I am in utter awe of both how students think they can simply fool us with new technology, while cheating themselves from the joy and benefits of learning and how inhumane they themselves become in consequence. I went into teaching and academic to follow my passion after successful careers in journalism and Public Relations, and I never expected that I would even entertain yet another career change, but AI might end up depriving us of the joy of teaching and any human aspects of this important profession.