A candidate for the Ph.D in Comparative Literature and this year’s Jeffrey Berg Fellow, José Alaniz is writing a dissertation entitled Necrotopia: Discourses of Death and Dying in Late/ Post-Soviet Russian Culture. With approaches deriving from psychology, anthropology, literary theory and media studies, Alaniz traces the emergence of a new vision of death in late twentiethcentury Russia. Specific chapters will be devoted to the representation of death and dying in the sensationalist press, the cinema, postmodern literature, and the just-emerging Russian hospice movement.