Dominick Lawton

Dominick Lawton researches and teaches the literature, cultural history, and intellectual history of Russia and the former Yugoslavia, particularly during the twentieth century. His current book project, tentatively titled "The Poetics of Materialism in Russian Revolutionary Literature," examines the volatile new status of material objects and commodities under socialism (and capitalism) as a productive social and aesthetic problem for late Imperial and early Soviet Russian literature.

He is working on a second project about literary and cinematic responses to the transformation of domestic space in Russia and the Balkans, both during and after the socialist period.

Lawton studied at Yale University and U.C. Berkeley before coming to Stanford. He has contributed to the volume Comintern Aesthetics (U. of Toronto Press, 2020), and has an article forthcoming on communal apartments in the work of Mikhail Bulgakov. He has also published on the pedagogical use of modernist poetry for addressing nonbinary gender expression in modern Russian.