Irina Simova received her PhD from the department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and has served as an editor for the Alexander Kluge-Yearbook. Her scholarship addresses twentieth- and twenty-first-century Germanophone and Eastern European film, performance, and literature. She focuses specifically on interdisciplinary problems of globalization, neoliberal governance, biopower, migration, ecocriticism, and film, media and AI often in reference to French and affect theory approaches. Her first book in progress explores aesthetic works in the Germanophone sphere that investigate late capitalism and forms of experience and affect 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 artistic performances and novels since 2000. The project examines the mobilization of affect as a critical language that challenges and re-negotiates post-reunification and post-communist narratives about identity, memory, migration, (techno-)capitalism, ethnicity, and gender. The work centers around plays, films, performances, and novels by Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Necati Öziri, Nurkan Erpulat, Christoph Schlingensief, Elfriede Jelinek, Georgi Gospodinov, and Stephan Komandarev.
EDUCATION & TRAINING
- Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Princeton University
- M.A. in Comparative Literature, Princeton University
- M.A. in Classics, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany
COURSES TAUGHT
- Marx & Marxism, Fall 2023
- German Drama, Spring 2024
- Germanic Myths, Legends and Sagas, Spring 2024 (recitations)