Liam is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences pursuing a degree in Comparative Literature and Russian and East European Studies. He is from Philadelphia. Liam is interested in 19th century and early 20th century Russian literature, theory, and culture. He investigates the relationships between reader, author, and text and how these relationships inform class, power, and the social world. Liam is also interested in literary sentimentalism and romanticism, innovative literary form, and cultural semiotics. Liam's project aligns with his honors thesis in Russian and East European Studies and an advised research position with the Russian and East European Studies department. Outside of his studies, you can find Liam immersed in Philadelphia sports fandom, playing videogames, or working at a bar.
Liam Phillips
Wolf Humanities Center Undergraduate Fellow
2023—2024 Forum on Revolution
Liam Phillips
Comparative Literature, Russian and East European Studies
Form and Figure in the Russian Avant-Garde: From Mikhail Kuzmin's Stroinost' to Filmic Montage
Mikhail Kuzmin’s (1872-1936) Wings (Kryl’ia, 1906) was published in a radical era of transition in Russia: Wings is the first gay Russian novel, spurring shock and disapproval in literary circles and readers. The semi-autobiographical Wings reflects Mikhail Kuzmin’s own conflicts with the revolutionary upheaval around him. Kuzmin’s novel is in search of a new community defined by its focus on a subjective form of reading and study of texts, images, and languages outside of the general Russian readership. Through Wings, Kuzmin grasps his readership with a textual montage of sensations that sets itself in opposition to the political newspapers of the period. My project seeks to define how Wings desires to create community in its readership, ushering a revolution unlike the political 1905 Russian Revolution.