Screening Russian Hackers

Building on the current book project Imagining Russian Hackers: Myths of Men and Machines, this lecture aims to theorize and historicize the relationship of the (former) West’s Russian hacker imaginations to screen technologies, the history of media and war, and fiction power. Not only do screens screen the former West from its favorite enemy, but imagining Russian hackers reveals an underlying tangle of the military-industrial-academic-entertainment complex in which viewers remain victims—but not of Russian hackers.

Marijeta Bozovic is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, with secondary appointments in Film and Media Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is the author of Nabokov’s Canon: From Onegin to Ada (2016) and Avant-Garde Post– : Radical Poetics After the Soviet Union (2023); and co-editor of the volumes Watersheds: Poetics and Politics of the Danube River and Nabokov Upside Down. She is currently working on a co-authored book with Benjamin Peters entitled Imagining Russian Hackers: Myths of Men and Machines (under contract with Chicago).

Benjamin Peters is the Hazel Rogers Associate Professor and Chair of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa, where he also teaches in Cyber, Honors, and Russian. He is also an affiliated fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.