Professor Dina Khapaeva led a keynote discussion at the University of York's 2nd Death and Culture Conference on September 6-7, 2018. Professor Khapaeva's keynote "Death as a Cultural Condition" discussed the facination of death in the mid-1990's on screen and in fiction, covering Gothic and apocalyptic genres in popular culture from the late 1970's - 2010's. 

Dina Kapaeva joined the School of Modern Languages in 2012. She received a PhD in Classical Studies from St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia. She studies Russian literature and culture, including the grand literary tradition and Soviet and post-Soviet fiction and film. Her research and teaching interests lie in the intersection of cultural studies, memory studies, medievalism, history of emotions and death studies. Her most recent book project, The Celebration of Death in Russia and America (University of Michigan Press, 2017) compares the ways of engaging with death and representations of violent death in Russian and American popular culture.