Academic Studies Press

Academic Studies Press Academic Studies Press is a scholarly publisher based in Boston, MA that specializes in Jewish and Slavic studies.

Founded in 2007, Academic Studies Press quickly established itself as a leading publisher in both Jewish and Slavic studies. Our monographs, multi-authored collections, anthologies, critical companions, and memoirs are frequently and highly recommended by CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, and our books have been the recipients of many awards, including the National Jewish Book Award for Education and Jewish Identity, the Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award in Holocaust Literature, and the Helecki Award for Outstanding Book on the Polish Experience in America. Our books are curated in collaboration with our series editors who are major scholars in their respective fields.

Friedrich Gorenstein’s Psalm as Soviet Jewish Speculative Fiction⠀⠀Join the Harriman Institute at Columbia University fo...
09/25/2026

Friedrich Gorenstein’s Psalm as Soviet Jewish Speculative Fiction⠀
⠀
Join the Harriman Institute at Columbia University for a conversation about Friedrich Gorenstein’s Psalm — one of the most original and provocative works of late-Soviet Russian-Jewish literature.⠀
⠀
Featuring Marat Grinberg, author of the book’s afterword, and Andrew Bromfield, its English translator, the discussion will explore Psalm as both a work of Soviet Jewish imagination and speculative fiction, placing Gorenstein alongside the rich tradition of Soviet and East European science fiction.⠀
⠀
Moderated by Mark Lipovetsky.⠀
⠀
📖 Psalm: A Novel/Reflection on the Four Plagues of the Lord, translated by Andrew Bromfield with an afterword by Marat Grinberg, was published in English by Academic Studies Press / Cherry Orchard Books in 2026.⠀
⠀
📍 Harriman Institute, Columbia University⠀
🗓 Registration required by 4 PM, October 1, 2026⠀
⠀
https://harriman.columbia.edu/event/friedrich-gorensteins-psalm-as-soviet-jewish-speculative-fiction/⠀
⠀
Reserve your seat via the Harriman Institute.⠀
⠀

🏆 Academic Studies Press is delighted to announce the winner of the inaugural ASP Distinguished Manuscript Award in Slav...
09/16/2026

🏆 Academic Studies Press is delighted to announce the winner of the inaugural ASP Distinguished Manuscript Award in Slavic Studies!

Congratulations to Dr. Anna Balestrieri, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose project, Rassvet: The Cultural Renaissance of the Zionist Revisionist Movement, has been selected for this year’s award.

Our expert panel praised the project as an original and compelling reframing of the émigré journal Rassvet—long read primarily as a vehicle for Zionist Revisionist politics—as a vibrant cultural and intellectual hub in its own right.

Drawing on archival research across Berlin, Paris, and Mandate Palestine, the book offers fresh insight into the interwar Russian-Jewish diaspora and builds connections between Slavic Studies, Jewish Studies, and diaspora studies.

Congratulations, Dr. Balestrieri! We are very excited to work with her and look forward to bringing this important project to publication.

A new review of Pavel Lembersky’s Two Hundred Brand New Shiny Cadillacs is out in The Seaboard Review of Books.“Lembersk...
09/11/2026

A new review of Pavel Lembersky’s Two Hundred Brand New Shiny Cadillacs is out in The Seaboard Review of Books.

“Lembersky’s prose is energetic, heteroglossic, ceaselessly inventive from the get-go,” writes Olga Stein.

Moving between 1990s Moscow, America, Hollywood history, crime, memory, and the fantastical, the novel resists easy categorization — part noir-ish thriller, part fictional memoir, part film history, and something entirely its own.

Read Olga Stein’s full review, “Dealing in Wheels and Devils,” in The Seaboard Review of Books.

Two Hundred Brand New Shiny Cadillacs by Pavel Lembersky is available now from Academic Studies Press.

What happens when you look directly at the unbearable?On a night train through a country gone dark, Myroslav looks out a...
09/08/2026

What happens when you look directly at the unbearable?

On a night train through a country gone dark, Myroslav looks out at the void where the lights of Ukraine used to be. Somewhere in that darkness, his oldest friend has gone to war — and stopped answering his phone.

In Medusa’s Gaze: A Little Book of Darkness, acclaimed Ukrainian writer Lyubko Deresh turns to the ancient myth of Medusa to ask what it means to remain human in the midst of catastrophe.

The novel follows four friends from Lviv through love, fear, memory, friendship, and the impossible choices of wartime. Woven through their stories is the voice of a young woman from an occupied city by the sea, who can tell the story of her survival only as a myth: the story of how Medusa was born.

Whoever looks directly at the unbearable turns to stone. To survive, we need a mirrored shield — friendship, philosophy, desire, story itself.

A cult figure in Ukraine since his teenage debut, Lyubko Deresh appears in English for the first time with a novel shortlisted for the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine.

Medusa’s Gaze
by Lyubko Deresh
Translated by Dmytro Kyyan and Kate Tsurkan

Coming December 20, 2026 from Academic Studies Press. 🔗 Available for preorder now from Academic Studies Press and booksellers worldwide.

🎙️ New on The Slavic Literature Pod: Akhmet Baitursynov’s Mosquito⠀⠀Translator Jake Zawlacki joins The Slavic Literature...
09/04/2026

🎙️ New on The Slavic Literature Pod: Akhmet Baitursynov’s Mosquito⠀
⠀
Translator Jake Zawlacki joins The Slavic Literature Pod to discuss Mosquito (Masa) — Akhmet Baitursynov’s landmark collection of poetry, now available in English for the first time.⠀
⠀
First published in 1911 and expanded in 1922, Mosquito contains some of Baitursynov’s most overtly political poetry. Writer, educator, linguist, and one of the intellectual forefathers of modern Kazakhstan, Baitursynov imagined the collection as a way to awaken his people — a persistent buzz calling them toward education, cultural consciousness, and a future nation.⠀
⠀
In the episode, Jake Zawlacki talks about Baitursynov, the historical and cultural world behind the poems, and the challenge of bringing this foundational work of Kazakh literature into English.⠀
⠀
🎧 Listen to the episode:⠀
“Mosquito by Akhmet Baitursynov (with translator Jake Zawlacki)” — The Slavic Literature Pod⠀
⠀
📚 Mosquito⠀
Akhmet Baitursynov⠀
Translated by Jake Zawlacki⠀
Central Asian Literatures in Translation⠀
Academic Studies Press⠀
⠀

How do Western media portray Russia — and what do those representations reveal about the West itself?In Under Western Ey...
08/26/2026

How do Western media portray Russia — and what do those representations reveal about the West itself?

In Under Western Eyes: Vulnerable Minorities and the Russian State in New Cold War Cultures, Katharina Wiedlack examines how gender, sexuality, race, vulnerability, and power shape representations of Russia across news media and popular culture.

Moving from LGBTQ+ communities and feminism to masculinity, whiteness, and representations of Russian women on American television, Wiedlack challenges the familiar binary of a progressive West confronting a “backward” Russia.

Instead, she asks how Western narratives can expose very real repression while also reinforcing ideas of Western moral and cultural superiority — and how Russian and Western imperial narratives can become entangled.

🎧 In a new conversation on New Books Network, Katharina Wiedlack discusses the ideas behind Under Western Eyes and why the ways we represent vulnerability, difference, and power matter.

Listen to the interview — and discover the book.

📖 Discover Under Western Eyes and order your copy from Academic Studies Press.

Today, on Ukrainian Independence Day, we celebrate not only a country, but the freedom of a culture to speak in its own ...
08/24/2026

Today, on Ukrainian Independence Day, we celebrate not only a country, but the freedom of a culture to speak in its own voice.

Literature is one of the places where that freedom lives.

To read Ukrainian writers — across generations, genres, and languages — is to encounter Ukraine through its own stories, memories, arguments, humor, experiments, and imagination. It is also to recognize a literary tradition on its own terms: complex, diverse, and continually evolving.

At Academic Studies Press, we are proud to publish books that bring Ukrainian literature and culture to readers around the world — from literary modernism and contemporary fiction to works exploring memory, identity, history, and cultural transformation.

On August 24, we invite you to discover some of these voices.

Because reading a literature is also a way of recognizing its freedom to tell its own story.

What changes when Ukrainian modernism is placed more fully within the story of European modernism?Ukrainian Literary Mod...
08/21/2026

What changes when Ukrainian modernism is placed more fully within the story of European modernism?

Ukrainian Literary Modernism of the 1910s–mid-1930s: A Critical Reader, Volumes I & II, introduces Anglophone readers to an extraordinary period of theoretical innovation, avant-garde experimentation, and poetic reinvention in Ukraine.

Volume I explores literary theory, criticism, and Ukrainian Formalism. Volume II turns to manifestos, artistic movements, and poetry — bringing together voices that shaped one of the most vibrant cultural moments of the early twentieth century.

“A groundbreaking collection” and “an indispensable handbook,” writes Ulrich Schmid, Professor of Eastern European Studies at the University of St. Gallen.

Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London, calls the two-volume Reader “an invaluable and much-needed resource for Slavists and comparatists alike.”

Edited by Halyna Babak, Yuliya Ilchuk, and Andrei Ustinov.

Two new books in the ISGAP Critical Contemporary Antisemitism Studies series examine the far-reaching intellectual, poli...
08/20/2026

Two new books in the ISGAP Critical Contemporary Antisemitism Studies series examine the far-reaching intellectual, political, and institutional consequences of October 7.

In Redemptive Antisemitism after Ten/Seven, David Patterson explores the historical and ideological currents shaping contemporary political and moral discourse.

In College Zionists Confront the Abyss, Cary Nelson turns to higher education, examining campus activism, faculty politics, ideological polarization, and the changing university landscape after October 7.

Different in focus but deeply connected, the two books ask broader questions about how political crises transform institutions, public debate, and the ways societies define moral and intellectual responsibility.

Both are now available from Academic Studies Press.

Most people know Baron Munchausen as the eccentric storyteller who flew on a cannonball and pulled himself out of a swam...
08/14/2026

Most people know Baron Munchausen as the eccentric storyteller who flew on a cannonball and pulled himself out of a swamp by his own hair.

Far fewer know that one of the most remarkable continuations of his story was written not in 18th-century Germany, but in 1920s Soviet Russia.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's The Return of Munchausen was written in 1927–1928 but remained unpublished for more than sixty years. Too philosophical, too experimental, and too unsettling for its time, the novel only reached readers after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Today, Academic Studies Press presents a new English edition that is much more than a translation. Complete with extensive commentary, it opens the door to Krzhizhanovsky's rich world of literary allusions, philosophy, and political satire, making this extraordinary novel accessible to students, scholars, and curious readers alike.

Sometimes the greatest adventures are the ones that wait decades to be discovered.

Address

Boston, MA
02446

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5:30pm
Tuesday 9am - 5:30pm
Wednesday 9am - 5:30pm
Thursday 9am - 5:30pm
Friday 9am - 1:30pm

Telephone

+16177826290

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Academic Studies Press posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Academic Studies Press:

Shortcuts

Share

Category