Roman Utkin specializes in twentieth-century Russian poetry, prose, and visual culture. He is the author of Charlottengrad: Russian Culture in Weimar Berlin (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023). Charlottengrad examines the Russian émigré and exile community that found itself in Berlin in the aftermath of the 1917 Revolution. By closely studying the intellectual output of the Russian-speaking émigrés ensconced in Berlin’s Charlottenburg neighborhood, the book reveals a picture of some of the world’s first “stateless” peoples struggling to understand their new identity as emigrants and exiles, balancing their sense of Russianness with their position in a modern, bustling Western city, and navigating their political and personal positionality toward a homeland that was no longer home. 

Roman's recent publications include a thematic cluster of articles called "Illegal Queerness: Russian Culture and Society in the Age of Anti-LGBTQ Censorship" in The Russian Review, an essay on Vladimir Nabokov's use of disability in fiction, and a film review of the HBO documentary film Welcome to Chechnya. 

A native speaker of both Tatar and Russian, Roman has served 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 and a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures at Yale University. Prior to joining the Wesleyan faculty, he taught at Davidson College.