Ann Komaromi researches late Soviet culture, samizdat (underground publishing) and dissidence in the USSR. She is interested in the return of modernism and avant-garde in nonconformist and oppositional literary and art movements in the late twentieth century and beyond. Current projects include studies of dissident memoirs and archives, a history of Jewish activism in Leningrad, and an inquiry into trash and used objects in post-War visual art and museum exhibits. Her fellowship research project is titled Soviet Dystopia and Alternate Networks of Trust. Ann is one of our 2025-26 JHI Faculty Research Fellows.
What are your main research interests and what excites you most about them?
I study nonconformist culture and dissidence in the Soviet Union after Stalin. The way the historical avant-garde, modernist works and classic nineteenth century prose resurfaced alongside newer Soviet cultural forms fascinated me. And it turned out that the historical trauma of the Stalin era could be addressed with creativity and even laughter, alongside hard questions about guilt, complicity and the sources of mass violence and cultural destruction. This research led me to appreciate the complexity and richness of Soviet life and be on guard against myths about the authentic past or pure freedom of the west and liberal subjectivity. Combined with an interest in how underground publishing and transnational exchange worked, this basic interest has driven the rest of my research trajectory.
What project are you working on at the JHI and why did you choose it?
At the JHI I am studying Soviet dissident memoirs. I chose this project over a comparative art project I had been developing because of the Russian war in Ukraine and the threat to the rule of law and democratic norms and institutions around the world. We are seeing new challenges that binary distinctions and political oppositions from the Cold War do not adequately address. I am interested in how people shaped by real socialism approached the notion of rights, agency and solidarity. No one gets to have or keep a society that protects people without actively investing in it. Soviet rights activists modeled constructive social engagement that begins with personal relationships and behaviour to those around us. We have to think more about the significance of location and embodied differences. This means, for example, grappling with both the affordances and blind spots of human rights as a universalist discourse. Those are among the questions that occupy me this year.
How has your JHI Fellowship experience been so far?
It is very special to have time and space to hear about others’ projects and have extended conversations about them. Finding obvious and unexpected points of common interest (rights, the importance of location/ground, and solidarity and friction across various contexts and perspectives) inspires me to think in new ways about my research.
Why do you believe the humanities are important?
The humanities teach us to be flexible and respond to actual people and situations. My research has led me to treat texts as records of the human voice and as material objects that are produced and transformed as they travel among various people across boundaries. We need the humanist commitment to close reading of style and forms of expression. At the same time, we benefit from critical skepticism toward established conceptions and truths, whether those are reverently associated with canonical works, or assumed by a theory that claims to explain all cases.
Can you share something you read/watched/listened to recently that you enjoyed/were inspired by?
I went to see the movie Eddington in the theatre after my daughter mentioned it. Maybe seeing it on the big screen affected my perception of it, but I was stunned by the portrayal of an unhinged world in a small Western American town where political divisions and weird conspiracy theories run amok. The film seemed to suggest that, more than Covid, the changes wrought by tech companies have altered our world almost beyond recognition; this created a delightful sense of sublime horror that exceeded even the strange and violent events portrayed. The performances were wonderful and the generic ambiguity – was it satire? Psychological thriller? Horror? Comedy? All of those? - made viewers in the hall react audibly, with groans and laughter. I still think about it.
What's a fun fact about you?
I grew up in Missouri, and I am fascinated by the pungent smell of black walnut husks – I always pick them up from the ground in the fall to remember what they are like, and my fingers get black from the juice of squeezing them to get the scent. You can’t really shell them yourself, but we used to buy them, and I ate chocolate chip cookies with the distinctive taste of black walnut pieces growing up.