Nancy Condee
Nancy Condee, professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Slavic
Languages and Literatures in the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Arts and Sciences, is the
inaugural director of Pitt’s Global Studies Center (GSC). She served as the director of Pitt’s
Cultural Studies Program from 1995 to 2006. Dr. Condee continues to serve as the first academic
director of Pitt’s Multi-region Academic Program (Pitt MAP), which has successfully launched
four study tours in recent years. Dr. Condee also teaches in Pitt’s Film Studies Program.
In announcing Dr. Condee’s appointment as GSC’s director, Lawrence Feick, director of
Pitt’s University Center for International Studies, stated:
Nancy is an exceptional scholar and teacher and brings those qualities and values with
her to this position. Because Global Studies is a newly funded center, in this appointment
I also was looking for someone who would be able to effectively and effortlessly work
across disciplines to build the program. In her interdisciplinary work with Cultural
Studies and Film Studies, as well as in her very successful launch of the Pitt MAP
program, Nancy has demonstrated that she has the passion and ability to pull together
faculty from across the University’s departments and schools to work successfully on a
common agenda. I believe that we will build our Global Studies Center into one of
the best in the country under Nancy’s leadership.
Formerly the Global Studies Program, Pitt’s GSC is part of the University Center for
International Studies. Global Studies received its first-time designation as a National Resource
Center by the U.S. Department of Education in August 2010. The Center fosters
interdisciplinary, comparative and cross-cultural learning and research on critical global issues
within the focus areas of global health, global security, global economy and global society.
Dr. Condee’s current research interests focus on contemporary (post-1964) Russian
culture, with an emphasis on film, literature and popular culture. She specializes in contemporary
Russian cinema, Russian cultural politics, empire theory and cultural studies, and she teaches a
wide range of courses including: Empire and Nation, Stalin Cinema, Russian Culture, Russian
Speculative Philosophy and Tolstoy: The Major Novels. Her publications include Imperial
Trace: Recent Russian Cinema (Oxford 2009), chosen for the top 2010 research award by the
Society for Cinema and Media Studies; the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) Aldo and
Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures (2011); as one of eight
books on Russo-Soviet cinema listed in the 2010 edition of World on Film; and as a finalist in
2010 and 2011 for Best Book of Slavic Literary and Cultural Criticism, American Association
for Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages.
Dr. Condee has also coedited the following volumes: The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov,
with Birgit Beumers (I. B. Tauris, 2011); Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity,
Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, with Terry Smith and Okwui Enwezor (Duke, 2008);
Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Grand Style, with Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko
(Northwestern University Press, 2000); and Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late 20th
Century Russia (Indiana University Press, 1995). Her writing has appeared in publications of the
MLA, The Nation, October and Sight and Sound, as well as in major Russian and Soviet
journals.
Dr. Condee has worked as a consultant for, among other entities, the Edinburgh Festival,
Public Broadcasting Service’s Frontline, the Library of Congress, the San Francisco Film
Festival, the National Film Theatre in the U.K., and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and
Humanities.
Together with Vladimir Padunov, Dr. Condee directed the Working Group on
Contemporary Russian Culture supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the
Social Science Research Council. She was chair of the board of directors of the National Council
of Eurasian and East European Research from 2002 to 2006. Dr. Condee is currently president of
the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages and serves on the
board of directors of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. She chairs
the board of directors of the National Council on Eurasian and East European Research
(NCEEER), and is co-founder and co-editor of the journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema
(Intellect Books). Dr. Condee has supervised 46 Master’s theses and Doctoral dissertations.
Fluent in Russian, German, and French, Dr. Condee earned a Ph.D. from Yale University
in 1979, a Master’s degree from Brown University in 1973, and a Bachelor’s degree from Sarah
Lawrence College in 1972, all in Russian studies.