Zdenko Mandušić
Assistant Professor, Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures
Zdenko Mandušić is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures.
Mandušić’s research and teaching interests include Russian and South Slavic cinemas, film theory, East European art and culture after communism, and the articulation of nationalism in literature and films. In particular, his work focuses on issues of cinematic authenticity, reality effects, the imaginary conceptualization of technology, and the influence of discourse on the production and reception of art.
Mandušić is currently working on a book project, titled Restoring Reality: The Documentary Turn in Soviet Cinema After Stalin, which focuses on the mobilization of documentary elements in Soviet fiction films of the 1950s and 1960s. This project correlates the visual strategies of feature-length films with the discourse on the divide between documentary and fiction aesthetics during the post-Stalinist revitalization of Soviet cinema. His next book will examine the representation of history in contemporary Russian and post-Yugoslav cinema and literature, addressing the function of novels and films as de facto sites of historical (re-)narrativization.