Her major areas of interest include 20th-century English and East European literatures, Romanticism, critical theory and philosophy, semiotics and culture. Albena's latest publication is her book, The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry: Reference, Trauma, and History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). In it, she challenges the belief that postmodern literature and deconstructive writing have cut off literary discourse from reality, and reads the often incoherent production of postmodern poets as testimony to a traumatic post-totalitarian (ideological) or post-industrial (technological) reality.