About

Anne Eakin Moss is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Slavic Languages & Literatures Department at the University of Chicago, where she has been teaching since 2021. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University, obtained in 2005, and specializes in modern Russophone literature and culture within the Russian Empire and the former Soviet Union. Her research interests include Russophone literature, realism and modernism, gender and sexualities studies, philosophies of community, Soviet cinema and film theory, revolutionary aesthetics, and documentary cinema. Moss's scholarly work explores the relationship between art, ideology, and power, with a particular focus on how works of art engage audiences and create communities both as historical experiences and theoretical constructs. Her first book, 'Only Among Women: Philosophies of Community in the Russian Imagination, 1860-1940,' investigates the idea of an ideal community of women in Russian and Soviet culture, analyzing its origins in Russian novelistic tradition, its role in modernism, and its presence in Stalinist cinema. The book offers a rethinking of gender's significance in radical and conservative thought within Russophone culture and was translated into Russian for the Gender Studies series at Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie. Her current projects include a book titled 'The Special Effects of Soviet Wonder,' which examines Soviet sound cinema's immersive techniques during its formative decade, and how these methods aimed to create utopian worlds filled with song, abundance, and vigilance. She is also engaged in research on communities of artists inspired by Soviet avant-garde, the divergent paths of feminist theory during the Cold War, and narrative and documentary cinema by women directors in Eastern Europe and Russia. Moss teaches courses on the Russian novel, Soviet culture, gender, cinema, Slavic literary theory, and the environment in the Soviet literary imagination.

Research topics

• Art
• Aesthetics
• History
• Art history
• Visual arts
• Psychoanalysis
• Literature
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Women's Pension Reform: Congress Inches Toward Equity

  University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In the workplace and in the home, women suffer economic injustices. The inequities of our private and governmental pension systems compound their financial problems, leading to inadequate retirement income for many older women. For example, only ten percent of women age sixty-five and over received private pensions or annuities in 1982, as compared to twenty-nine percent of men age sixty-five and over. Women receiving pensions likewise get much less than men, averaging $1,520 in 1982. The average for men in 1982 was $2,980. Gradually, policymakers are recognizing the shortcomings of pension systems. In the past few years, federal legislation has greatly expanded women's pension rights. As this Article argues, however, much remains to be done. Part I of the Article discusses recent pension legislation. Part II discusses possibilities for future legislation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Legacies of Protest Art in Iran

  Public Culture · 2024-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article examines the art practice of a group of professors and students—who later came to be known as Group 57—at the Fine Arts College of the University of Tehran during the revolutionary period of 1978 to 1980. Through interviews with artists and art historical research, the authors describe the artists’ workshop where they produced posters against the Shah, the United States, and imperialism. Their posters drew on the bold colors, clear text, symbolic imagery, and easy reproducibility of international radical poster art and the early Russian revolutionary avant-garde. The authors recover these aesthetic and intellectual connections in the academic and professional training of the artists and in the art historical context of the posters themselves, examining the posters’ recent and more distant influences, and reinscribing the artists in the history of Iranian art and international art history. The authors also point toward connections between Group 57 and protest art in Iran today.

  PublisherDOI

• 7 White on White and The Black Square: Shepitko’s The Ascent, Stan Brakhage, and Cinematic Abstraction

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2024-08-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Remarks on The Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought and the woman question

  Studies in East European Thought · 2022-09-23

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 20 SEEING THE FATHER: MEMORY AND IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION IN ELISABETH PLESSEN’S MITTEILUNG AN DEN ADEL

  Berghahn Books · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychoanalysis
  • Psychology
  • Art
  PublisherDOI

• Esfir Shub: pioneer of documentary filmmaking

  Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema · 2022-09-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  "Esfir Shub: pioneer of documentary filmmaking." Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 16(3), pp. 260–261

  PublisherDOI

• Special Effects and German Silent Film: Techno-Romantic Cinema by Katharina Loew

  MLN · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Aesthetics
  • Literature

  Reviewed by: Special Effects and German Silent Film: Techno-Romantic Cinema by Katharina Loew Anne Eakin Moss (bio) Katharina Loew. Special Effects and German Silent Film: Techno-Romantic Cinema. Amsterdam UP 2021. 320 pages. The pioneering efforts of German filmmakers to make visible the invisible phenomena of the psyche and mind are the focus of Katharina Loew’s new book, Special Effects and German Silent Film: Techno-Romantic Cinema. Drawing on path-breaking research into the early history of special effect practices in Germany in the 1910s and twenties, she argues that advancements in the technological capabilities of cinema paradoxically served to articulate the highly ambivalent attitudes toward technology prevalent in popular culture of the time. What she calls “techno-romantic” cinema encompasses the depiction of phenomena that exceed both the indexical possibilities of film and conventional assumptions about the optical mediation of the world, such as the uncanny, the occult, and the sublime. In charting the efforts of filmmakers to depict spiritual and mental experience on screen, she shows how the techno-romantic paradigm drove innovation in the medium and, in turn, how these explorations of cinematic possibility offered audiences and critics new ways of thinking about the relationship between art and the world. The book should be read not only by film specialists, but also by those for whom assumptions about early cinema’s ‘essence’ shape conclusions about the intellectual and cultural history of the era, both in Germany and beyond. The book’s six chapters each stand on their own such that they could be excerpted for teaching purposes, though together they build a case for the [End Page 605] international and enduring influence of German cinematographic innovation from the silent era to the present. Chapter 1, “Imagining Technological Art: Early German Film Theory,” reframes German film theory around a focus on its treatment of special effects. Loew shows in this chapter how early German film theory reconciled artistic ideals with cinema’s technological basis. Film trick capabilities, by allowing filmmakers to manipulate the photographic image and thereby evoke ideal realms, elevated cinema to art. Drawing on early film critics including Gustav Melcher, Will Scheller, Herbert Tannenbaum, and Georg Lukács, Loew shows how advancements in film technology helped to expand theorists’ understanding of the liberating possibilities of aesthetic experience. In turn, the Schillerian Romantic valorization of semblance or Schein as a means of imaginative liberation endowed filmmakers’ play with the surface of the filmstrip and trickery of the eye with philosophical weight. Exemplary practitioners of that play are the main protagonists of Chapter 2, “Modern Magicians: Guido Seeber and Eugen Schüfftan.” In this chapter, Loew’s original research and technical know-how particularly shine. Focusing in on two of the most influential masters of early special effects techniques, she traces their professional biographies and shows how their skills and aspirations for cinema opened new expressive horizons for the medium. Seeber, who innovated compositing effects executed on the film strip, and Schüfftan, who combined images in the studio through the use of mirrors, collaborated with directors to expand the imaginative possibilities of German cinema, and transmitted their skills through their writing and entrepreneurship. Seeber achieved complex compositing effects via multiple exposures with carefully placed mattes in order to give life to the controlling gaze of the Grand Lama in Lebende Buddhas (1923/1925) and to produce the doppelganger in Der Student von Prag (1913). As the technical director of Deutsche Bioscop and a prolific author of technical handbooks for the trade, Seeber exercised an influence on the look and the technological aspirations of cinema in these formative years that cannot be underestimated, and that extended internationally including into the Soviet Union. Eugen Schüfftan was the creator of the patented Schüfftan process, which used a mirror with a transparent section to capture live action at the correct scale together with a projected image. It was most famously put to work for the effects in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), but, as Loew charts, the elegance of this special effect kept it in use for several decades despite other technological advancements. Schüfftan’s entrepreneurship helped both to spread the use of the technique, and...

  PublisherDOI

• 12. Cinema as Spiritual Exercise: Tarkovsky and Hadot

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Visual arts
  PublisherDOI

• Cinema as Spiritual Exercise: Tarkovsky and Hadot

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2020-09-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines Tarkovsky’s cinema in relation to contemporary philosopher Pierre Hadot’s concept of spiritual exercises. As the chapter demonstrates, each of Tarkovsky’s films could be seen as such spiritual exercises because of numerous parallels with Hadot’s theory: all his protagonists demand of themselves extreme forms of mental concentration, focused on goals that depart from the everyday and can only be seen as metaphysical, and all of them are quixotic seekers passionately involved in spiritually transcendent quests characterized by deep attention to the world around them. Furthermore, the author argues, the viewer’s experience could also serve as an example of Hadot’s idea of how spiritual exercises might be practiced via deepening and transforming habitual perception.

  PublisherDOI

• The Camera Shot and the Gun Sight

  Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article examines the connections be- tween the camera shot and the gun sight in the age of classic Hollywood cinema. Com- paring THE LOST PATROL (USA 1934, John Ford) with TRINADTSAT (THIRTEEN, UdSSR 1936, Mikhail Romm), it asks what kind of relationship films from this era strove to establish between the viewer and the gun shot on screen. The ideological and stylistic differences between the films make visible divergent fantasies of agency, community and technology.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Helene Zimmer-Loew

  2 shared

• Der Spiegel

  1 shared

• Janet Williams

  1 shared

• Nancy J. Church

  SUNY Plattsburgh

  1 shared

• James C. Davidheiser

  University of Pittsburgh

  1 shared

• Barry Belanger

  Milwaukee Health Department

  1 shared

• Narges Bajoghli

  Johns Hopkins University

  1 shared

• Richard Gould

  Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust

  1 shared