Adam Laten Willson
Adam Laten Willson is an advanced doctoral student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. He holds Master’s degrees in Comparative Literature (University of Glasgow, 2019), Slavic Languages and Literatures (Northwestern, 2023), and Russian (Middlebury, 2025). He recently completed an academic year of study in Kazakhstan with the support of the Boren fellowship. His dissertation examines how late Soviet Central Asian and Siberian authors used literary experimentation rooted in oral performance to unsettle Soviet hegemony and imagine alternative national futures from within Soviet mainstream culture. The project combines oral-formulaic theory, performance studies, and decolonial critique and traces parallels in Francophone African literature, thus bringing Soviet cultural studies into conversation with urgent interdisciplinary debates about empire, national agency, and Global South postcoloniality.