Rebecca Stanton (Ph.D. Columbia, 2004) works primarily on Russian prose of the Soviet period, in particular the "long 1920s" (1917-1934).  Her literary interests revolve around self-narrative, narrative roguery, and the city text, with secondary interests in popular and mass culture, Ukrainian language and literature (in progress), and choral music. She holds a B.A. from Columbia in Russian and French literature, and completed a graduate minor in German literature. As her eclectic background might suggest, she is interested in "borderline" phenomena: mixed identities, surzhyk, the fate of texts as they cross boundaries between genres, generations, historical eras, or national entities, and between performer and audience.

Professor Stanton has published articles on Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Babel, and the Odessa city-text, and is currently completing a book, "Isaac Babel and the Self-Ishness of Odessan Modernism," which examines the role of self-narrative, as practised by Babel and other writers of the so-called "Odessa School," in shaping early Soviet literature. Other current projects include an exploration of magical discourses in Soviet literature (1917-1958), an essay on the famous "Potemkin Steps" in Odessa as a site of cultural memory, and a paper on the creative use of Soviet and Western symbols by the popular Kharkiv reggae/beatboxing duo 5'nizza.