Mina Magda

Mina Magda is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. She researches nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian and French literature, visual art, and performance, approaching these topics through questions of race, gender and sexuality, and postcoloniality. Her dissertation is entitled “The Body Eclectic: Negrophilia and Russophilia in Modernist Paris.” It is a comparative study on the Ballets Russes and Josephine Baker that focuses on exoticist cultural production in the context of French colonialism, diaspora, and modernism. She has also completed a certification in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale. Magda received her M.A. in Russian and Slavic Studies from New York University, where she also completed her B.A. in History of Art.

Magda has participated in ASEEES Conventions since 2014 as a panel organizer, discussant, and chair. In 2016, she received a travel grant from the Association for Diversity in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ADSEEES) in order to participate in the conference. If elected, Magda will work actively to bring graduate student voices into critical conversations on the state and direction of the field and to promote intellectual exchange with colleagues from various disciplines.