Irina Denischenko is a PhD candidate in Slavic and comparative literature at Columbia University, where she received her M.Phil. (2013) and MA (2012) degrees. Irina is currently completing her dissertation entitled “Mikhail Bakhtin and the Twentieth-century Poetics of Language in Central and Eastern Europe,” focusing on the coevolution of artistic practices and linguistic thought in the 1920s and 1930s. Her research interests include Soviet literary theory and philosophy of language, the avant-garde in Central and Eastern Europe, and contemporary literature of the region.