Rate My Professor Julia Alekseyeva

Julia Alekseyeva is an Assistant Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University in 2017, with a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies. Before joining Penn, she served as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and taught courses at Harvard University and Brooklyn College. Alekseyeva's scholarship centers on the intersections of global media and radical leftist politics, adopting a comparative and transnational approach to film, comics, television, and digital media produced in Japan, France, and the former Soviet Union. Her debut academic monograph, Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s (University of California Press, 2025), contends that 1960s French and Japanese experimental documentary practitioners engaged in antifascist practices that connected personal and political struggles, drawing connections to the 1920s Soviet avant-garde, notably Dziga Vertov. She has published extensively on related topics, including articles such as "Vertov and the Avant-Garde Documentary: Dreaming Reality in the 1960s, from the USSR to Japan" in Film History (2023), "Fury and the Landscape Film: Three Men Who Left Their Will on Concrete" in ARTMargins (2021), and "Self-Revolutions in Everyday Life: The Politics of ATG" in The Sixties (2021). Other publications appear in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (2025), Sequentials (2020), and Oxford Research in English (2019).

Complementing her academic output, Alekseyeva is an accomplished author-illustrator whose award-winning nonfiction graphic novel, Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution (Microcosm Publishing, 2017), chronicles her great-grandmother's life. She has contributed graphic essays to outlets like The Nib, Jewish Currents, and The Paper Brigade. Alekseyeva guest-edited the Winter-Spring 2022 Soviet Issue of Jewish Currents and is editing special issues for Arts ("The Arts of Abolition and Liberation"), Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (on Everything Everywhere All at Once), and Journal of Japanese and Korean Studies. Her excellence in teaching was recognized with the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching by an Assistant Professor in 2024. She also held a Wolf Humanities Center Penn Faculty Fellowship in 2020-2021.