Faculty Profiles

Irina Simova received her PhD from the department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Her scholarship addresses twentieth- and twenty-first-century Germanophone and Eastern European film, literature, and performance. She focuses specifically on interdisciplinary problems of globalization, neoliberal governance, biopower, migration, media, AI, and ecocriticism often in reference to political theory approaches. Her first book in progress explores cinematic works in the Germanophone sphere that investigate the political economy of body management in late capitalism and forms of experience developed around entrepreneurship, endurance, anxiety, risk management, and precarity. She has previously written on Alexander Kluge, Michel Foucault, Lauren Berlant, Christoph Schlingensief, Harun Farocki, and Karl Marx, among others. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Goethe Gesellschaft, and the Princeton University Institute for International and Regional Studies. Her next project focuses on global political shifts in Central and Eastern Europe reflected in literature, film, and performance since 2000. The project examines the ways in which contemporary artists re-negotiate post-reunification and post-communist narratives about political rights, identity, memory, migration, (techno-)capitalism, ethnicity, and gender. Prior to Reed College, she served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of German at the University of Pittsburgh and as co-editor of the Alexander Kluge-Yearbook. The 9th edition of the Yearbook, Crisis and Astonishment, was published in November 2024.