Office: Moore Hall 457 | Phone: (808) 956-4181
Email: kostetsk@hawaii.edu
Anastasia Kostetskaya is an Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She holds a PhD in Theory of Language and a BA/MA in Teaching English and German as Foreign Languages from Volgograd State Pedagogical University, Russia, and another PhD in Russian Literature and Culture from The Ohio State University. She teaches Russian language, literature, and culture courses including Russia: between Europe and Asia, Russia: Faces of Asia, and 100 Years of Russian Film.
Together with Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova, she is co-editor of Historical, Literary, and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood (Routledge, 2022). She is the author of Russian Symbolism in Search of Transcendental Liquescence: Iconizing Emotion by Blending Time, Media, and the Senses (Lexington Books, 2019); and with Tatiana Ivushkina, co-author of Социолингвистические характеристики речи студентов Кембриджа и Гарварда[Sociolinguistic Characteristics of Students of Cambridge and Harvard (reflected in campus fiction)] (Перемена, 2003).
Dr. Kostetskaya’s current research explores Soviet war childhood; childhood memory of civilian Stalingrad at the intersection of Russian and German cultures; Russian and German cinematic Stalingrad discourse; oral and written narratives of child-survivors and teenage Ostarbeiter and preservation of memory; childhood and national identity in Russia and East Germany; and revolutionary childhood. Her articles and book reviews have appeared in Names: A Journal of Onomastics, Slavic and East-European Journal, German Life and Letters, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Filoteknos: Children’s Literature, Cultural Mediation, Anthropology of Childhood, Detskie chteniia/Children’s Readings: Studies in Children’s Literature (Research Institute of Russian Literature/Russian Academy of Sciences) and Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly.
In addition to her scholarly work, Anastasia is the author of Larik Olivier, UnLtd., a humorous yet poignant blend of memoir, fiction, and cultural memory, forthcoming in Russian with Vremya Publishers (Moscow). The story follows Larik—a five-year-old “early and unwitting defector”—as he navigates Moscow and London in the late 1970s–80s through the lens of bilingual humor. The project draws directly on her research interests in childhood, bicultural identity, memory, and metaphor. More can be found at larikolivier.substack.com.
She has served as a UH Mānoa Senator and as an executive officer of the international research group ChEEER (Childhood in Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and Russia), affiliated with ASEEES.