�����������

José Vergara is a scholar and teacher of Russian language and culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with some trips back into the nineteenth and beyond the borders of Russia.

His scholarship has focused on the reception of cultural icons, continuity, and influence, and centers around a desire to understand the experiences of human beings in inhuman settings, from incarcerated spaces to poisoned ecologies. His first book,  (2021) expands our understanding of how twentieth-century Russian writers responded to the work of one of the English language’s most influential modernists, James Joyce, whom the official Soviet establishment considered decadent and obscene. José’s special focus in the reception of Joyce is the role of lineages and belonging; he shows how despite the often restrictive climate of Soviet literary spheres, many writers managed to cultivate their own personal Joyce, a process that allowed them to explore their own unsettled relationship to fatherhood and historical experience. 

He is currently at work on three primary research projects. First, his manuscript-in-progress, inspired by teaching in and about prisons, addresses post-Soviet Russian prison texts. It examines how the authors of these works position themselves vis-à-vis their predecessors and challenge the tradition’s form. He is interested in both narratives written by artists who have been jailed (as well as those who became writers because they were imprisoned) and those that turn their gaze further back, such as fictional accounts of Soviet prison labor camps. 

Second, following an amazing experience teaching in a 360º Program cluster focused on the afterlives of energy extraction around the world and that includes a nine-day fieldwork trip to southeast Alaska with students, he is developing a project investigating the representation of Alaska in Russian culture. This project asks where Alaska lies on the map of Russian literature and where it overlaps with the political geographies of the Russian and Soviet empires. It considers how Alaska fits into the Russian cultural imagination in various epochs and examines the echoes of colonialism that persist in the former “Russian America.”

Finally, alongside collaborators at ����������� and beyond, he is writing and building , an open-access resource devoted to the filmography of American writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. This project involves annotating, scene by scene, screenshots from each of his ten narrative films to date.

He is also co-editor of (2022) and project director of , a bilingual digital edition of Sokolov’s dense novel — both available in open access.

At �����������, he has taught a wide variety of topics: Russian language, , experimental literature, queer Russian culture, , , the Russian Novel (of the classical, modernist, and postmodernist varieties), and contemporary Russian culture and society. He also teaches at SCI-Chester as part of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, which brings together college students with incarcerated students for a transformative learning experience.

His writing and interviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, Music & Literature, and Words without Borders, among other venues. More information can be found on his .

When he can will free time into existence, José may be found playing soccer, gardening, tending to his ducks and chickens, and spending time with his family.