Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on November 5, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Vlad Strukov. Moderated by Mark Lipovetsky.
Vlad Strukov will use gender and sexuality as critical lenses through which to examine how international, institutional and independent actors participate in the ongoing renegotiation of normativity across politics, society and culture, taking Azerbaijan as a point of departure. The concept of the post-atheist society will provide a framework for rethinking established theoretical debates around religion, spirituality, secularism and emancipation, drawing on Derrida and others.
In particular, he will ask how forms of belonging are articulated in Muslim-majority secular cultures whose histories complicate conventional distinctions between the religious and the secular, tradition and emancipation, and, subsequently, normativity. Strukov’s analysis of Azerbaijan’s experience will challenge and complicate “national” accounts of modernity and neoliberal forms of contemporaneity.
Strukov will approach visual culture as a key arena in which these tensions are negotiated, contested and made legible. He will analyze visual discourses and narratives across a broad range of sites, including major museums, urban projects, film festivals, cultural events and other texts, in order to trace how institutions and cultural actors participate in the production, disruption and reconfiguration of the norms.
More broadly, Strukov’s research seeks to challenge theoretical models of secular modernity that have been developed primarily through Western European, transatlantic histories. By foregrounding the experience of post-atheist, Muslim-majority societies, it asks how our understanding of secularism, belonging and emancipation might change when these concepts are approached from locations shaped simultaneously by Soviet atheism, Muslim cultural histories, and globalization.
The research underpinning this presentation is supported by a major international AHRC-DFG grant involving researchers from the Universities of Leeds in the UK and Regensburg in Germany. Vlad Strukov is the principal investigator of the project. The presentation will be also of interest to those who wish to develop research collaborations with European universities and learn more about funding opportunities in the UK and beyond.
Vlad Strukov’s research is on visual cultures in global settings, with emphasis on contemporary art and film. Related areas of enquiry are digital cultures and queer cultures. Across these fields, he addresses theoretical questions of visibility, visuality and materiality, as well as (anti-)identity and post-representation. His work draws on Jacques Derrida’s philosophy, and more recently on Derrida’s engagement with Sufism. Vlad is active as editor and curator, shaping debates through exhibitions, publications and networks that connect artists and scholars across the Global East and Global South. His publications include books on contemporary cinema (Edinburgh UP), popular geopolitics (Routledge), memory and securitization (Palgrave), and others. His forthcoming publication is a volume on streaming and film cultures. He is Professor of Film and Visual Culture, University of Leeds (the UK), and Visiting Professor of Contemporary Art and Curating, Ca-Foscari University, Venice (Italy). He is the founding director of the Leeds Centre for Global Queer Cultures and Politics.
