Aleksandra Simonova

Aleksandra Simonova is a Russian-born and US-based anthropologist and filmmaker. She is a PhD candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at UC Berkeley. In her work, she combines an interest in writing and theoretic exploration with visual and sensorial experience. She has a background in political studies and sociology with BA from Moscow State University and MA from European University at St. Petersburg. In her research, she studied ongoing social and political transformations wrought by the disintegration of the Soviet Union into different national states. Relying on substantial ethnographic research in Crimea, my project explores the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine since the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

• Socio-Cultural anthropology
• Film and media studies
• Post-Soviet studies

• Visual anthropology
• Memory
• Nationalism
• Post-Soviet studies

• PhD in Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
• MA in Sociology, European University at St. Petersburg
• BA in Political Science, Lomonosov Moscow State

• Teaching Assistant in the courses Introduction to Anthropology, Art and Utopia.

• Performing Infrastructure: The Cultural Biopolitics of the Russian State in Crimea, Russian Literature, 2023 May 29. 
• Putinism’s Defeated Opposition, review on the book Dissidents Among Dissidents: Ideology, Politics and the Left Post-Soviet Russia by Ilya Budraitskis, Verso 2022. Dissent Magazine, Fall 2022: 160 - 165.
• Coworking Environments: The Hackerspace and The Skolkovo Innovative City in Moscow in From Russia With Code, the edited volume, ed. Biagioli M., Lepinay V. Duke university press, 2019.