Kirill Veselkin

Kirill Veselkin is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on contemporary American literature, nuclear and post-nuclear poetics, Cold War affect, and the cultural imagination of catastrophe. His work examines how nuclear rhetoric, deterrence logic, and apocalyptic imagination shape literary form after the Cold War.
He holds an MA in Journalism from Moscow State University and an MA in Comparative Literature from UT Austin. A Fulbright alumnus, he has presented his work at academic conferences and won the 2026 Community Choice Award for Excellence at UT Austin’s Empower Your Research Pitch competition. His current project develops the concept of “nuclear poetics” to study how literature registers catastrophe as atmosphere, affect, and narrative structure rather than only as event.