Dr. Julia Alekseyeva
Dr. Julia Alekseyeva
Dr. Julia Alekseyeva is a multi-modal scholar of media, film, and culture, specializing in the interactions between global media and radical leftist politics. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania with a secondary affiliation in Cinema and Media Studies (CIMS). Her courses frequently combine history, theory, and media production elements. She specializes in the film and media production of Japan, France, and the former Soviet Union. Her work bridges the public and the academic, and she has co-led workshops on theories of antifascism and abolition, grassroots comics creation, and political artmaking. Her first academic book, Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s, will be published in February 2025 by the University of California Press.
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Dr. Alekseyeva is also a graphic artist specializing in non-fiction graphic narratives, comics journalism, and memoir. Her first full-length graphic novel, a nonfiction historical memoir entitled Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution, was published by Microcosm in January 2017, and won the 2017 VLA Diversity Award. Since 2017 she has published shorter non-fiction graphic essays in both peer-reviewed journals/book anthologies (Sequentials, Concentric, The Routledge Companion to Global Literary Adaptation, Artistic Representations of Suffering: Rights, Resistance, Recognition) and in popular outlets such as The Nib, Jewish Currents, Paper Brigade, and Lilith.
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She is a socialist and ardent antifascist, and her creative and academic work reflects her values.
Antifascism and the Avant-Garde
"Sweeping in scope, Antifascism and the Avant-Garde is a major contribution to both film studies and fascism studies. Julia Alekseyeva is singularly positioned to undertake a comparative study that moves with ease between decolonizing France, postimperial Japan, and the Soviet Union. Her insightful analysis reveals how filmmakers of the antifascist avant-garde undertook formal experiments and created affective atmospheres that subverted the positivism and rationality of traditional documentary, grounding their work in an understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, between perception and antifascist consciousness."—Jackie Wang, author of Carceral Capitalism
"As the clouds of right-wing populism gather on the horizon of late capitalism, Alekseyeva's brilliant and accessible study of experimental documentary filmmaking deftly argues for the value of art that celebrates ambiguity and uncertainty while simultaneously nurturing the militant optimism necessary to carry on the fight for justice."—Kristen R. Ghodsee, author of Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Bold Experiments Can Teach Us about the Good Life
"Antifascism and the Avant-Garde explores the important and timely question of antifascist aesthetics—how antifascism can look and how it can operate. From a deep grounding in French and Japanese documentary film of the 1960s, Alekseyeva weaves a fascinating picture of echoes, resonances, and conflicts among filmmakers concerned with the use of cinema to counter fascism."—Jennifer Coates, author of Film Viewing in Postwar Japan, 1945–1968: An Ethnographic Study
"A tour de force of genuinely global film studies. Alekseyeva maps out a fascinating net of site-specific but deeply interconnected cinematic quests for radical media literacy that spans the Soviet Union, Japan, and France—quests that only gain more burning significance in our current media situation. Astonishing in its breadth, and essential reading for anyone truly invested in global film dynamics."—Alexander Zahlten, author of The End of Japanese Cinema: Industrial Genres, National Times, and Media Ecologies
"With an extraordinary depth of expertise in French, Japanese, and Russian film, theory, and history, a political commitment to an internationalist approach and revolutionary phenomenology, and the curious eye and heart of a close reader of Marxist culture and avant-garde documentary, Alekseyeva introduces us to the critical tradition of antifascist documentary. Here we learn of a range of films and theories, all aligning the political and the psychological, pain and liveliness, pleasure and discomfort, subjectivity and objectivity. Alekseyeva compellingly argues that their shared antifascist aesthetic forefronts epistemological inquiry. While rooted in films from the 1960s, she demonstrates how this approach is and must be part of an ongoing and responsive project against power, one that teaches us how to see—a radical media literacy for radicals! In this critical contribution to documentary studies most broadly, Alekseyeva establishes how this tradition of engaged documentary contributes to a daily and human antifascist project, abetted by cinema: one of passion, critique, ambiguity, complicity, and disruption."—Alexandra Juhasz, producer of The Watermelon Woman and coauthor of We Are Having this Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production
