Julia Alekseyeva is an Assistant Professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. in 2017 from Harvard University’s Department of Comparative Literature, with a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies, and has taught at Harvard and Brooklyn College. Prior to her appointment at Penn, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. She researches the interactions between global media and radical leftist politics. Her work is fundamentally comparative and transnational, and delves into the film, comics, television, and digital media of Japan, France, and the former Soviet Union.

Prof. Alekseyeva has just completed a book manuscript tentatively entitled Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s. Specifically, this work argues that French and Japanese practitioners and theorists of experimental and political documentary of the 1960s saw their work as engaging explicitly in an everyday practice of antifascism that joins personal and political struggle. In addition, she argues that this practice and ideology is tied to the work of the 1920s Soviet avant-garde, and especially to avant-garde documentarist Dziga Vertov. She has previously written on topics such as the avant-garde documentary in East Asia, Pink Film, transnational animation, Soviet avant-garde film, and the French New Wave.

Along with her academic research and teaching, Prof. Alekseyeva is also an author-illustrator, whose award-winning non-fiction graphic novel, Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution, was published in 2017. She has published several articles on global film and media history, in both written and graphic narrative format, in The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, ARTMargins, The Nib, The Sixties, Cine-Files, Oxford Research in English, Jewish Currents, Concentric, and The Paper Brigade, alongside chapters in anthologies published by Bloomsbury, Routledge, and Rowman & Littlefield. She also guest-edited the Jewish Currents "Soviet Issue" in Winter-Spring 2022.