Dustin Condren is a scholar of Russian literature and culture with a primary research focus in early Soviet cinema. He earned his Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Stanford University and joined OU's Department of Modern Languages, Literature, and Linguistics in 2019. He is a core faculty member of the OU Romanoff Center for Russian Studies and an affiliated faculty member in Film and Media Studies.
He is the author of An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film (Cornell University Press, 2024). The book tracks the remnants of great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s unmade projects against the backdrop of the political realities of early Stalinist Russia and the practical contingencies of film production, and is concerned with questions of the unfinished, of failure, and of the infinite.
His current book project is an exploration of the ways in which early Soviet films employed animals and images of them in their construction of new economic and political realities in the post-revolutionary and early-Stalin era.
An active translator, he has published multiple book-length translations from Russian.
He regularly teaches courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century prose, poetry, and dramatic literature; Russian and Soviet cinema; film history and theory; and upper-level Russian language.
