Profile
Prof. Klots received his Ph.D. in Russian literature from Yale University in 2011.
Before joining Hunter in 2016, he taught at GA Tech, Williams College, and Yale. He was also a Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the Research Center for East European Studies at the University of Bremen (Germany).
His research interests include book history, Russian and East European émigré literature and culture, urbanism and literary representation of cityscapes, contemporary Russian poetry, linguistic anthropology, bilingualism and translation, and Gulag narratives (particularly Varlam Shalamov).
In 2010, he published Joseph Brodsky in Lithuania (St. Petersburg: Perlov Design Center; in Russian), and co-translated, with Ross Ufberg, Tamara Petkevich's Memoir of a Gulag Actress (Northern Illinois UP, 2010). His most recent book is Poets in New York: On City, Language, Diaspora (Moscow: NLO, 2016; in Russian). His monograph Tamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War Era(Cornell UP, 2023) is devoted to the circulation, reception and first publications of literary manuscripts from the USSR in the West.
At Hunter, Yasha Klots teaches a variety of courses on Russian literature and culture, Russian theater, urban mythology, Gulag literature, and immigrant narratives. He is the director of Tamizdat Project, a public scholarship initiative and a community of collaborators and volunteers.