Lidia Zhigunova, Senior Professor of Practice in German and Russian at Tulane University. She is an expert in Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet studies, with a special focus on Russia's ethnic minorities and the history of Russia as a multiethnic empire. Her research interests include Russian ethnic politics and the dynamics between the Russian state and the states and the republics of the Caucasus region, as well as studies of trans-diasporic mobility.

Lidia Zhigunova holds a PhD from Tulane University (2016) and an MA degree in Comparative Literature from Louisiana State University (2002).

In addition to the language (Russian and German) courses, taught at Tulane and LSU, she has taught seminars on “Ethnic Minorities Experience in Russia,” “Revisiting the Dead House: Russian Narratives of Political Imprisonment,” “Narratives from the Post-Soviet Borderlands: Russia and the Caucasus,” “Exploring Russia and Ukraine,” “Russian Film: Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema and Society,” “19th Cent Russian Literature in Translation,” “Linguistic Rights and Indigenous Language Activism in the Russian Federation,” “Russian Modern Literature, 1930-Today,” “Tolstoy/Dostoevsky in Translation.”