Periods: Modern and Contemporary

Languages: Russian, French, German

Research interests: the intersection of literature and the visual arts; genre theory; film theory and history; critical theory and cultural studies

Jacob Plagmann received his B.A. in Comparative Literature and Russian from the University of Oregon before coming to Princeton. He is interested in exploring different approaches to modern art and literature and in his research often draws on scholarship in art history, philosophy, linguistics, social theory and cultural studies. Most recently, he has been occupied with 20th-century Russian and Soviet theories of art and literature.

In his current research project, he analyzes how late-Soviet writers and filmmakers, working in the 1960s-70s, deconstruct myths about Soviet history and society encoded in the iconography of Socialist Realism. His study explores the way these artists balance a wide-ranging experimentation with different modernist aesthetics including Soviet montage, Italian neorealism and French New Wave with a commitment to addressing promises of socialist modernity to a mass audience.