I am a social theorist and cultural sociologist at the University of Virginia, where I serve as Co-Director of the Modernity Seminar and Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. In fall 2026, I will launch the Hope and Crisis Lab and serve as its Founding Director. Earlier in my career, I was Full Professor at HSE University, where I founded the Moscow Centre for Cultural Sociology.
My work develops a sociology of enchantment: a research program that locates the sources of fascination, intrigue, and wonder within modern life itself rather than in residues of pre-modern worlds. Beneath the familiar story of disenchantment, I trace how the ordinary environments of modernity — cities and screens, strangers and stories, futures and hopes — generate their own affective charge. Enchantment is not what modernity has lost; it is what modernity keeps producing.
The program rests on a long engagement with the Durkheimian theory of the sacred, which I have reworked to foreground its ambiguity — the tension between its beneficent and terrifying poles — as a neglected key to the cultural dynamics of modernity. On this ground, three lines of my recent research converge: a sociological theory of cathexis, which opens the study of the "energetic" architectures of action environments; a theory of mystery, which shows how modern culture transforms ordinary gaps in knowledge into sites of affective tension and imaginative engagement; and a rethinking of narrative, which reveals how the stories people live by structure time, anticipation, and life trajectories. The same perspective has informed my work across diverse domains, including body and self, education and inequality, and technology. This work has an extensive empirical side: for over a decade, I was Principal Investigator of Russia's largest longitudinal cohort study of life trajectories.