Alexandra Ilf has spent the last seven years preparing numerous editions of Il'f and Petrov's literary heritage, including the first complete edition of Il'f's Notebooks in 2000, an album of Il'f's Moscow photography, and her most recent endeavor, Ilya Ilf, or The Love Letters. Il'f, an editor and translator, resides in Moscow. Read more... (in Russian)
Anne Fisher from Tulsa, Oklahoma is a Ph.D. candidate in Russian Literature in the University of Michigan's Slavic Department. The current title of her dissertation is "Strategies of Textual Transmission: Soviet Editions and Adaptations of Il'f and Petrov's Ostap Bender Novels," and she plans to defend the dissertation in August 2005. Fisher was 2004-5 Graduate Student Fellow at the University of Michigan's Institute for the Humanities. She has instructed courses in Slavic Film, first- and second-year Russian, and Great Books, where she was a Graduate Student Mentor for the year 2003-4. She spent a year in Moscow on a Fulbright after receiving her MA from the Slavic Department in 1999 and has presented papers on Chekhov, Il'f and Petrov, and Ostap Bender at conferences in Poland, Russia, and the US. She received a BA in Russian from the University of Oklahoma in 1997, despite having spent over half of her undergraduate years studying abroad in Scotland, Germany, Austria, and Russia. Her current projects include her dissertation and a translation of Il'f and Petrov's 1937 photo-essay "Amerikanskie fotografii" ("American Photographs"). Apart from Il'f and Petrov and early Soviet culture and prose, Fisher is also interested in Mark Twain, Will Rogers, and bookbinding.
Vadim Besprozvany is Ph.D. candidate in Russian Literature and Rackham predoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.
Read Vadim Besprozvany's paper
Erika Wolf, a doctoral graduate of the University of Michigan, teaches in the Art History and Theory Programme at the University of Otago (New Zealand). Wolf's research area is Soviet visual culture, especially Soviet photography before World War II.
