Thomas Seifrid

Thomas Seifrid also directs the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at USC. In 2013-14 he was president of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL).

He primarily studies twentieth-century Russian literature and culture, particularly that of the Soviet 1920s and 1930s; Russian philosophy of language of the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries; the life and works of Vladimir Nabokov; and Polish language and culture.

In addition to many articles, he is the author of Andrei Platonov: Uncertainties of Spirit (Cambridge UP, 1992) and The Word Made Self (Cornell UP, 2005), a study of the prolific body of writings produced in Russia from roughly 1860 to 1930 which seek to define the nature of language (or the Word, or Logos).

He is currently working on a study of connections among ideology, literary genre (including theater), and urban space in early Soviet culture. He has a strong secondary interest in Polish language and culture.