Yuliya Komska

I am the author of The Icon Curtain: The Cold War's Quiet Border (University of Chicago Press, 2015), a book about a German wall that didn't fall in 1989. It tells the story of how contemporaries (German refugees, especially) dramatized an uneventful Cold War landscape, which stretched between West Germany and Czechoslovakia, and brings together travelogues, accounts of defaced Christian imagery, poems, and a host of archival sources. The book received Honorable Mention for the Modern Languages Association's biannual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures for 2014-15. A Chinese translation appeared with the Shandong Pictorial Publishing House in 2018.

Together with Irene Kacandes, I co-edited the volume Eastern Europe Unmapped (Berghahn Books, 2017), which pushes against the perception that for this part of the world, geography has been destiny.

With Michelle Moyd and David Gramling, I co-wrote a programmatic book Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language (Palgrave Pivot, 2018).

I am also at work on two longer book manuscripts. One, provisionally titled How Did They Get There: What H. A. and Margret Rey Gained and Lost to Become American, is a biography of the literary parents of America's most famous fictional simian. Steeped in the authors' personal, political, and publishing history, it asks how exactly two German-Jewish refugees became all-American classics. The second book project, Perfect Propaganda: Cold War Radio in the Golden Age of Television, 1950-1967, is the first transatlantic visual history of Radio Free Europe (RFE), a key broadcaster into the Eastern bloc. Here I ask, quite broadly, about what makes "perfect propaganda" and, more specifically, about some very unconventional reasons for why RFE is still being perceived - and sorely missed - as America's ideal Cold War propaganda weapon. The answer, I suggest, involves parsing the broadcaster's relationship with television in its American golden age.

To view my academic articles, please go to https://dartmouth.academia.edu/YuliyaKomska

Occasionally, I write for the media on current topics. In the past, I have published with The Washington Post, Reuters, The Guardian, Pacific Standard, The Smithsonian Magazine, Boston Review, Euronews, LA Review of Books, and Al Jazeera America and spoken on the New Hampshire Public Radio.

I teach across the German Studies curriculum (including language) and in Comparative Literature, where I am also active in M.A. advising. My teaching interests include, aside from the core German Studies courses, Cold War culture, German environmentalism, propaganda, science fiction under socialism, civic language, multilingualism and monolingualism, and belonging in Germany.