Mikhail Epstein


Mikhail Naumovich Epstein is a Russian-American literary scholar and essayist who is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University, Atlanta, US. He there moved from Moscow, USSR, in 1990. He has also worked as a Professor of Russian and Cultural Theory at Durham University, UK, from 2012 to 2015, where he was the founder and Director of the Centre for Humanities Innovation at Durham University.
His areas of specialization include postmodernism, cultural and literary theory; the history of Russian literature and intellectual history; contemporary philosophical and religious thought, and ideas and electronic media. Epstein is also an expert on Russian philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries and on thinkers like Nikolai Berdyaev. He writes essays on cultural, social, ethical and international issues.

Biography

Epstein was born in Moscow, USSR, and is of Jewish heritage. He graduated from the Philological faculty of Moscow State University in 1972. He has been a member of the Soviet Writers Union since 1978 and the founder and director of the club "Image and Thought" and Laboratory of Contemporary Culture in Moscow.
He moved to the United States in 1990 and was a fellow of Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 1990–1991. He joined the faculty of Emory University in 1990. In 1992, he received a grant from the National Council for Soviet and East European Research to work on the history of Russian thought of the late Soviet period. He write InteLnet and a number of other interdisciplinary web sites in the humanities.
One of his major continuing projects is "On the Future of the Humanities: Paradigmatic Shifts and Emerging Concepts", on which he worked as an inaugural senior fellow at Emory University, and as a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University, England. He had visiting professor appointments at Wesleyan University and University of Oregon at Eugene.
Mikhail Epstein has won national and international prizes, including the Andrei Bely Prize ; The Social Innovations Award 1995 from the Institute for Social Inventions in London for his electronic Bank of New Ideas; the International Essay Contest set up by Lettre International and Weimar – Cultural City of Europe 1999; and the Liberty Prize, awarded for his outstanding contribution in the development of Russian-American cultural connections.

Ideas and terms

In the realm of aesthetics, Epstein, together with poet and conceptual artist Dmitry Prigov, is credited with introducing the concept of "new sincerity" as a response to the dominant sense of absurdity in late Soviet and post-Soviet culture. In Epstein's words, "Postconceptualism, or the New Sincerity, is an experiment in resuscitating 'fallen', dead languages with a renewed pathos of love, sentimentality, and enthusiasm".
In his exploration of contemporary spirituality, Epstein focuses on the concept of "post-atheism," or "minimal religion", discussed in particular in his correspondence with the Protestant thinker Thomas Altizer and extensively examined in Charles Taylor's book "The Secular Age" that refers to Epstein's work.

Books in English