Roman Utkin specializes in twentieth-century Russian and Soviet poetry, prose, and visual culture. He is the author of Charlottengrad: Russian Culture in Weimar Berlin (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023; paperback edition 2024). The book's title refers to Berlin’s borough of Charlottenburg, dubbed “Charlottengrad” in the 1920s. During this time, Russian refugees from the 1917 revolution and the civil war formed an expatriate community on an unprecedented scale and in doing so, presented the modern problem of statelessness. By closely studying the intellectual output of these individuals, the book reveals a picture of some of the world’s first stateless peoples struggling to understand their new identity as emigrants and exiles, balancing their sense of Russianness with their position in a modern, bustling Western city, and navigating their political and personal positionality toward a homeland that was no longer home. The book also reorients narratives of the establishment of Soviet culture by focusing on the ideological, aesthetic, and international circumstances that determined Russian literature’s split into Soviet and émigré modalities. Charlottengrad has been reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, Russian Review, German Studies Review, Modern Language Review, Slavonic and East European Review, and Slavic and East European Journal.

Roman is currently at work on his next book, Queer Russia: Genealogies of Difference from the Silver Age to Perestroika, which unifies historically marginalized voices into a singular narrative of modern Russian culture and demonstrates how those voices reshape our understanding of this narrative. Using the Silver Age, emigration, and perestroika as structuring chronotopes, the book explores authors, artists, and filmmakers who elaborated salient critiques of normative citizenship, love, and kinship while proposing alternative imaginaries of belonging. They did so by building on the promises of modernism, the values of the socialist revolution, and the legacies of imperialism. In assembling an archive of self-definitions, historical ephemera, and organizing tactics, Queer Russia renegotiates the categories of “queer” and “Russia” and their interrelation. The book attends to the specificity of Russophone and Soviet material that resists defaulting to analogies with approaches developed in Anglophone theory.

Although Roman's research has always focused on the cultural production of difference, Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine has solidified his commitment to studying Russia’s non-Russian cultures, especially in his native Tatarstan, as a means of understanding the vagaries of imperialism and cultural hybridity in the Soviet Union.

Roman's recent publications include a thematic cluster of articles called "Illegal Queerness: Russian Culture and Society in the Age of Anti-LGBTQ Censorship" in The Russian Review, an essay on Vladimir Nabokov's use of disability in fiction, and a film review of the HBO documentary film Welcome to Chechnya. 

A native speaker of both Tatar and Russian, Roman has served on the board of the Committee on Advocacy for Diversity and Inclusion within the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He is also a founding member of Q*ASEEES, the Society for the Promotion of LGBTQ Studies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Roman was educated in Russia and the United States, earning an undergraduate degree in philology at Kazan State University and a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures at Yale University.