Bio
Kit Pribble received her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley in 2022. Her areas of specialization are 19th and early 20th-century Russian prose, Romantic aesthetics, Bakhtin, and critical AI studies. She also specializes in second language acquisition with an emphasis on digital learning technologies and generative AI applications in the Russian language classroom. She is a member of the American Council of Teachers of Russian (ACTR) Board of Directors and the co-founder of the national Consortium for the Study of AI and Language in Slavic (C-SAILS).
Kit is currently working on a book titled A Chorus of Others: Russian Literary Culture, LLMs, and the Boundaries of the Author, which traces shifting conceptions of authorship in Russian literature from 1828 through the early 1930s. Bringing Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Zamyatin, and the Bakhtin Circle into dialogue with recent Russophone experiments in literary co-authorship with large language models, the book argues that contemporary anxieties about AI-generated writing intensify a long-standing tension between individual, ethically-charged creative intention and the external systems that shape literary language.
She is also a co-editor of Generative AI and the Future of Russian Language Teaching and Learning (Routledge, forthcoming). Select recent publications include “Fantasies of AI Co-Authorship: Experiments in Literary Ventriloquism” (New Literary Observer, forthcoming); “Against Optimized Efficiency: Why Foreign Language Learning Still Matters” (Critical AI, Duke University Press; free link here); and “Between Earth and Heaven: Lermontov, Byron, and Romantic Gnosticism” (SEEJ).
Kit teaches all levels of Russian language, as well as courses on Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet literature and culture. Recent seminar topics include Russian and American prison narratives; depictions of machine-human interaction in film and literature; Slavic and Central Asian folklore; and Russian for Global Debate. She is the Faculty Director for the “WFU/Tbilisi: Russophone Literature in the Caucasus” summer study abroad program in Tbilisi, Georgia. She is a Zachary T. Smith Faculty Fellow.