Anastasia Kalk

Visiting Scholar

Anastasia Kalk is a political theorist and historian of political thought with a particular interest in the relationships between democracy and socialism. She is a Visiting Fellow at the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia and holds a PhD in Politics and a Gender and Sexuality Studies Certificate from the New School for Social Research, along with a master’s degree in Sociology from the European University at Saint Petersburg. Her research centers on the history of democratic political utopias and critiques of the modern state and capitalism from the nineteenth century to the present. Currently, she examines the development of the feminist and socialist movement for family abolition in the Soviet Union through the political work of Nadezhda Krupskaya. Anastasia is also working on her first book manuscript, Boundary Critique, which traces how, from the French to the October Revolutions, the medieval commune idea evolved into a modern democratic aspiration to dissolve the capitalist sociopolitical system.

Participating Years

2026–2027

Radical Imagination: Temporalities and Geographies of Struggle

In a world of deepening crises, of socioeconomic inequities, of environmental collapse, of resurgent fascism and institutionalized authoritarianism, what is the place of radical imagination in creating more just worlds? While some think of the work of imagination as being outside of—at a distance to, or even in a different temporality than—everyday struggle, we want to shine a light on the work of radical practice as a form of imagination. We look to anticapitalist and antiracist organizing and thought, and the complex practices in time and place through which change is not only presented and represented but produced.