COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Moe Romanoff (they/them) is a trans Siberian Ukrainian PhD candidate in Comparative Literary Studies with a home department in Asian Languages and Cultures and a Mellon fellowship in the critical theory cluster. Their dissertation, “Unearthing Time: Climate Upheaval, Energy and Empire at the Sino-Siberian Borderlands,” centers on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Sinophone and Russophone cultural production along Sino-Russian environmental borderlands and across post/socialist periods. Their broad theoretical interests lie at the intersection of environmental humanities, energy humanities, film and media studies, and critical theory.

Originally from Irkutsk at the Buryat-Mongolian borderland, Moe has curated “A Siberian Poetics of Extinction in Cinema” for the Block Museum in 2022, a film program that reflects on the impact of the climate crisis on indigenous communities in Siberia/North Asia. In 2024-25, they were the graduate assistant at Northwestern University Press. More recently, Moe has served as a group leader and mentor for students participating in the Summer Research Opportunity Program (SROP) through the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Success in the summers of 2025 and 2026. Currently, they are the program coordinator for GradMAPS, a peer mentorship and support program they helped develop and expand. They are also the co-founder and co-editor of Lime, a born-digital journal of Northwestern’s Environment, Culture, and Society cluster, dedicated to querying and transgressing the boundaries of EH through emergent conversations, methods, and mediums on nature, climate, and the environment. They are proficient in Russian, Chinese, Spanish, and French. 

Moe’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Media+Environment, and AsiaArtPacific. They received their BA in Chinese from the University of Oxford in 2017, and their MPhil in Cultural Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2021.