Molly Brunson

MEMBER-AT-LARGE CANDIDATE

Molly Brunson is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, with a secondary appointment in the Department of the History of Art. She is also Faculty Director of Yale’s Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program. She specializes in the literature, art, and material culture of the Russian empire and Soviet Union. Her research focuses on the generative and fraught relations between the visual, verbal, and decorative arts, and how each seeks to understand the social, political, and ecological pressures of the modern world. Having spent her career moving between the study of literature and art history, Brunson believes in the intellectual and pedagogical power of interdisciplinary scholarship. 

Brunson’s first book, Russian Realisms: Literature and Painting, 1840–1890 (NIU Press, 2016), explored how an aesthetics of realism emerged from the persistent competition between word and image in the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Repin, and others. Russian Realisms received the award for Best Book in Cultural Studies from the American Association for Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages in 2016 and was translated into Russian in 2022 by Academic Studies Press. She is currently writing two books. The first, The Russian Point of View: Perspective and the Birth of Modern Russian Culture, considers the peculiar history of illusionism and spatial representation in Russian literature and painting. The second, The Underground: Mining and Matter in Russian and Soviet Culture, explores how industrial mining practices (and their products) became the materials for decorative, literary, and visual art traditions in the Urals, Ukraine, and Siberia. In 2025, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow.  

In addition to the opportunities that ASEEES offers for building interdisciplinary networks, Brunson values the professionalization efforts targeted to graduate students and junior faculty. A 2015 recipient of the First Book Subvention Award, she is honored to be chairing the committee for 2025. She is a committed mentor of doctoral students, having supervised over a dozen dissertations, and hopes to continue finding ways to support their work through ASEEES programs. A regular participant in the ASEEES convention since 2006, Brunson is eager to give back to the community during this exceptionally challenging moment for higher education.