Roman Utkin specializes in twentieth-century Russian and Soviet poetry, prose, and visual culture. He enjoys teaching and writing on queer theory, exile, comparative modernisms, performance studies, and cinema. His current book project, Russian Berlin, examines the patterns of migration and cultural flows between Eastern and Central Europe and shows how refugees from Soviet Russia formed a unique diasporic community in Weimar Berlin.

A native speaker of both Tatar and Russian, Roman serves on the board of the Committee on Advocacy for Diversity and Inclusion within the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He is also a founding member of Q*ASEEES, the Society for the Promotion of LGBTQ Studies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Roman was educated in Russia and the United States, earning an undergraduate degree in philology at Kazan State University (2007) and a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures at Yale University (2015). Prior to joining the Wesleyan faculty, he taught at Davidson College.