Nikon Kovalev

Nikon Kovalev (she/they) is a scholar, translator, poet, and graduate student at UT Austin in Comparative Literature. They received their BA in Economics in 2011 and a MA in philology in 2013 from the South Federal University (Rostov-on-Don, Russia). From 2014 to 2020, they worked as an editor of the poetry magazine Prosodia. Their reviews, essays, and poems have been published in Benn-Forum, Greza, ROAR, Vozdukh, Novy mir, Voprosy literature, and elsewhere. They have translated German, French and English poems and novels into Russian. In 2017, they earned their Ph.D. at the Institute of World Literature. Their dissertation topic was the Baroque influence in the works of Gottfried Benn. Until 2023, they worked there as a senior researcher. In 2018-2019, they were a lecturer at the Russian State University for the Humanities and the Higher School of Economics. In July 2022, they emigrated from Russia because of their stand against the unjustified invasion of Ukraine and their queer identity. In July-August 2022 they received a fellowship at the German Literature Archive (Marbach). They are currently a Researcher at the Department of Germanic Studies at UT Austin. In March 2023, they organized a seminar at the ACLA conference on Totalitarianism in Russia and Germany. Their research interests include 17th-21st Century German Literature, Russian Literature, Comparative Literature, and Gender Studies.