Mikhail Naumovich Epstein (also transliterated Epshtein; ; born 21 April 1950) is a Russian-American literary scholar and essayist who is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University, Atlanta, US. He moved there from Moscow, USSR, in 1990. He has also worked as a professor of Russian and Cultural Theory at Durham University, UK, from 2012 to 2015, where he was the founder and Director of the Centre for Humanities Innovation at Durham University.

His areas of specialization include postmodernism, cultural and literary theory; the history of Russian literature and intellectual history; contemporary philosophical and religious thought, and ideas and electronic media. Epstein is also an expert on Russian philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries and on thinkers like Nikolai Berdyaev. He writes essays on cultural, social, ethical and international issues.

Biography
Epstein was born in Moscow, USSR, and is of Jewish heritage. He graduated from the Philological faculty of Moscow State University in 1972. He has been a member of the Soviet Writers' Union since 1978 and the founder and director of the club "Image and Thought" (1986–1988) and Laboratory of Contemporary Culture in Moscow (1988–89).

He moved to the United States in 1990 and was a fellow of Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Washington D.C.) in 1990–1991. He joined the faculty of Emory University in 1991.  

One of his major continuing projects is "On the Future of the Humanities: Paradigmatic Shifts and Emerging Concepts", on which he worked as an inaugural senior fellow at Emory University, (2002–03) and as a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University, England (2011). 

Mikhail Epstein has won national and international prizes, including the Andrei Bely Prize (St. Petersburg, 1991); The Social Innovations Award 1995 from the Institute for Social Inventions in London for his electronic Bank of New Ideas; the International Essay Contest set up by Lettre International and Weimar – Cultural City of Europe 1999; and the Liberty Prize (New York, 2000).

Ideas and terms

In the realm of aesthetics, Epstein, together with poet and conceptual artist Dmitry Prigov, is credited with introducing the concept of "new sincerity" (novaia iskrennost) as a response to the dominant sense of absurdity in late Soviet and post-Soviet culture. In Epstein's words, "Postconceptualism, or the New Sincerity, is an experiment in resuscitating 'fallen', dead languages with a renewed pathos of love, sentimentality, and enthusiasm".

In his exploration of contemporary spirituality, Epstein focuses on the concept of "post-atheism," or "minimal [or poor] religion", discussed in particular in his correspondence with the Protestant thinker Thomas Altizer and extensively examined in Charles Taylor's book "The Secular Age" (2007) that refers to Epstein's work.

His books in English 
Ideas Against Ideocracy: Non-Marxist Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953–1991). New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, 264 pp.   https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/ideas-against-ideocracy-9781501350597/
The Phoenix of Philosophy: Russian Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953–1991). New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, 300 pp. 
 A Philosophy of the Possible: Modalities in Thought and Culture. Boston, Leiden et al.: Brill Academic Publishers, 2019, 365 pp.  
 The Irony of the Ideal: Paradoxes of Russian Literature. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017 
  Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (with Alexander Genis and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover). New and revised edition. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016, 578 pp.(of 28 chapters, 19 are written by this author). 
 The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto. New York–London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012, 318 pp.
 PreDictionary. Berkeley: Atelos, 2011, 155 pp. (paperback). 
 Russian Spirituality and the Secularization of Culture. New York: FrancTireur-USA, 2011, 135 pp.  
 Cries in the New Wilderness: From the Files of the Moscow Institute of Atheism. Trans. and intr. by Eve Adler. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2002, 236 pp. (hardcover and paperback). 
 Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication (with Ellen Berry). New York: St. Martin's Press (Scholarly and Reference Division), 1999, 340 pp. (of 23 chapters in this book, 16 are written by this author). 
 After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture, Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1995, 392 pp. Hardcover and paperback editions. Electronic edition, Boulder, Colo.: NetLibrary, Inc., 2000. 
 Relativistic Patterns in Totalitarian Thinking: An Inquiry into the Language of Soviet Ideology. Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Occasional Paper, #243. Washington: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1991,94 pp.

Essays

References

External links
Home page
An article on M. Epstein in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Nov. 2002)
Mikhail Epstein's works on the web:
In English: 
In Russian: 
 Dagnino, Arianna. Epstein, Mikhail (2012). The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto. London: Bloomsbury. A Review. Rhizomes, Issue 28, 2015

1950 births
20th-century male writers
Academics of Durham University
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Emory University faculty
Jewish American writers
Living people
Russian philosophers
Semioticians
Soviet literary historians
Soviet male writers
Writers from Moscow
Jewish Ukrainian social scientists