Ivan Sokolov
Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian and Humanities
Modern and contemporary Russophone literature and film; gender and sexuality; global (post)modernisms and avant-gardes; translation studies; lyric theory.
BA 2012 St. Petersburg State University, Russia.
MA 2014 St. Petersburg State University, Russia.
MA 2018 University of California, Berkeley.
Reed College 2025–.
Ivan Sokolov is a poet-scholar and translator from St. Petersburg, Russia, and, more recently, the San Francisco Bay Area. Ivan has a BA in English (2012) and an MA in American Studies (2014) from St. Petersburg State University in Russia. He is a PhD Candidate in Slavic at UC Berkeley where he is completing his dissertation on the poet Viktor Sosnora and the late-Soviet avant-garde. He specializes in modern poetry and poetics within the context of world literature. Ivan’s interest in the endurance of modernist aesthetics worldwide is informed by his training in the history of modern Russian culture. He works on Russian-speaking writers, filmmakers and artists who found themselves suppressed and recovered, displaced and translated, estranged and shared around the globe. He has published on experimental poets and writers from Russia (Mikhail Kuzmin, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Aleksandr Ilianen), Austria (Paul Celan) and the US (Gertrude Stein, Ron Silliman) and on the filmmaker Kira Muratova. Ivan is active as translator of the international avant-garde; you can find some of his creative work here.
At Reed Ivan teaches Humanities 110, twentieth-century Russian literature, and a course on modern queer cultures in Russia and Eastern Europe.