Mikhail N. Epstein is a literary theorist and critical thinker and is Professor of Russian and Cultural Theory and a director of the Centre for Humanities Innovation at Durham University (UK). His area includes postmodernism; new methods and interdisciplinary approaches in the humanities; literature, philosophy and religion in Russia; semiotics and language evolution; ideas and electronic media.

Born in Moscow, he moved to the USA in 1990. For more than twenty years Epstein has been Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian literature at Emory University (Atlanta, USA). He has authored 22 books and approximately 600 essays and articles some of which are translated into 17 languages.

Professor Epstein’s work represents a compendium of ideas that diverge from the existing paradigms in the humanities. His writings are full of proposals for new disciplines, for new genres and concepts, and for new words to describe them. His books in English include: After the Future: Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (1995); Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (with two co-authors, 1999); Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication (with Ellen Berry, 1999); and Cries in the New Wilderness: From the Files of the Moscow Institute of Atheism (2002), and PreDictonary: An Exploration of Blank Spaces in Language (2011).

His latest book is The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto. (2012). The concept of the transformative humanities emphasizes the constructive rather than purely explorative aspect of humanistic inquiry and calls for a reexamination of the far-reaching questions: How can the humanities affect the areas of their study? Which cultural practices can be built on the basis of our studies of language, literature, and philosophy?

Recently he launched new sites of Centre for Humanities Innovation at Durham University, including Minima: A Journal of Intellectual Micro–Genres.