Jennifer Flaherty

Jennifer Flaherty serves as an Assistant Professor in Slavic & Eurasian Studies at Duke University's Trinity College of Arts & Sciences since 2025, specializing in Russian literature and European intellectual history through comparative analysis of literary-political intersections in 19th-century contexts.

Her academic credentials include:

• Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley (2019)

Flaherty's research reinterprets Russian literary modernity through serf economy perspectives in her book project "The Unsocial Society: Peasants and the Making of Russian Literary Modernity," while her second project examines democratic populists. Her expertise spans literary form, continental philosophy, intellectual history, and literature-society dynamics, with emphasis on peasant narratives and folklore.

Recent publications reveal consistent exploration of literature's role in political subjectivity: 2025's "The Cry of the Heart" compares Russian/Ottoman Enlightenment emotion frameworks, while 2021 studies analyze Turgenev's narrative tensions and Nekrasov's democratic pathos, collectively demonstrating how 19th-century Russian writers navigated autocratic constraints through literary innovation.