Anatoli Ulyanov is a linguistic anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. His work examines propaganda, hate speech, and the semiotic production of enemies and violence across language, sound, images, and digital media. He combines data analysis with close interpretive scholarship, using computational instruments of his own design. Before joining academia, he worked in media and visual storytelling, serving as Head of Media at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center and Team Lead for the multilingual analysis of antisemitism, extremism, and harmful content in a Google/YouTube AI content-safety project. He collaborates with the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate and the California Civil Rights Department on hate-crime prevention, public engagement, and policy interventions.
EDUCATION

2026 — Ph.D. in Anthropology (in progress), Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles / Los Angeles, CA

2024-2026 — M.A. in Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles / Los Angeles, CA

2006 — M.A. in Journalism, Taras Shevchenko National University / Kyiv, Ukraine.

2005 — B.A. in Journalism, Taras Shevchenko National University / Kyiv, Ukraine.
Research Interests

Semiotics of Conflict and Violence: How language, image, and discourse construct enemies and make violence possible — through dehumanization, stigmatization, and the circulation of hate across media, propaganda, and everyday speech.

Computational Semiotics: Purpose-built software, corpora, and visualization systems for the analysis of meaning at scale — mixed-methods design where close interpretive reading and computational pattern detection operate as one procedure, extended to the semiotics of machine-generated discourse and human-machine interaction.

Visual and Ethnographic Methods: Documentary film as a mode of ethnographic inquiry and public scholarship — multimodal fieldwork, community-based production, and the transformation of research into work that circulates beyond academia.
PUBLICATIONs

Peer-Reviewed Articles

Ulyanov, Anatoli. 2026. "Palatal Violence: Sonic Gatekeeping and Enemy-Making in Wartime Ukraine." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 36 (2): e70069.
https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70069.

In Progress "Pigdog: Semiotic Ecology of a Wartime Invective."


Fellowships and Awards

Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship (2024, 2028)
UCLA Initiative to Study Hate — Research Innovation Fund (2025)
Carolyn Lew-Karon & Michael Karon / Keck Digital Research Fellowship (2026)
Blavatnik Archive Spring Fellowship (2026)
Bluma Appel Research Grant (2025)
Harry and Yvonne Lenart Fellowship (2025)
CERS Research Fellowship (2025, 2026)
CERS Conference Grant (2025)
ASEEES Convention Grant (2025)
UCLA GSRM (2025, 2026)
UCLA GRM (2025—26)
TOXIC LEXICON (FROM WAR TO PEACE)
How Language Makes—and Unmakes—Violence
Examines how language, image, and sound make enemies — and make killing acceptable — in Russian-Ukrainian wartime discourse, from state propaganda to everyday speech. Develops a framework for reading the semiotic mechanics of dehumanization, and for identifying the points at which they can be undone.

Supported by the UCLA GRM/GSRM Award, Harry and Yvonne Lenart Fellowship, and the CERS Research Fellowship. Mentorship: Igor Pilshchiko, Erin Debenport, Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan.
PORTABLE ENEMY: Antisemitic Postcards and the Semiotics of Dehumanization
Working from the Blavatnik Archive's 1890–1930 collection, the project asks what the postcard medium does to the operation of hatred. A format built for speed and brevity, carrying no envelope and splitting agency between printed image and handwritten note, turns stigmatization into an ordinary genre of friendly correspondence. Supported by the BA Research Fellowship.

SEMIOSCOPE
A Research System for Computational Semiotics
Builds a digital research environment for analyzing meaning across text and image, where material is coded for form and the dimensions hostility runs on: affect, stigma, and the social context of use. Relational analytics and thematic clustering hold close interpretive reading and corpus-level pattern analysis in a single traceable workflow.

Supported by the Carolyn Lew-Karon & Michael Karon / Keck Digital Research Fellowship.
UNHATE!
Documentary Film Project
Ethnographic film on how people learn, sustain, and overcome hate, built from interviews with affected communities, scholars, and individuals navigating enmity and polarization. The project treats documentary film as public scholarship, transforming fieldwork into an accessible narrative intervention. Supported by the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute, the Initiative to Study Hate Research Innovation Fund, and the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies.
RESEARCH-in-Progress
ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS

2026 — Researcher, UCLA Department of Sociology.
Archival research on the Holocaust; analysis of criminal cases of collaboration with Nazi occupation authorities. Supervised by Aliza Luft.

2026-27 — Teaching Assistant, Department of Anthropology, UCLA.
Courses: Culture and Communication (Supervised by Zion Mengesha); Topics in Regional Cultures: Italy and the Mediterranean.

2025 — Researcher, UCLA Initiative to Study Hate with the California State Commission on Hate and Civil Rights Department.
Analyzed hate offender typologies, motivations, and behavioral patterns; developed policy recommendations and a hate crime coding system for law enforcement. Supervised by David N. Myers and David A. Kalkstein. 2024 — Researcher, UCLA Department of History.
Archival research on Soviet-era media, the Holocaust, and the Volhynia massacre; led a research network under wartime constraints. Supervised by Jared McBride. 2024 — Researcher, UCLA Slavic Department.
Gender labor in Soviet cinema: developed a cross-temporal archival database. Supervised by Lilya Kaganovsky.
PUBLIC ENGAGEMENTS

2026

Anthropology and/of Violence: Perspectives from Ukraine. Panelist, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, St. Louis, Missouri.

Killtalk: Military Linguistic Infrastructure and the Semiotic Production of a Soldier. Presentation, Department of Anthropology, UCLA.

Assembling the Enemy: Antisemitic Postcards and the Semiotics of Dehumanization. Panelist. Blavatnik Archive Final Colloquium, New York, NY

Stalin is Watching Being Watched. An Ethnography of Evaluation and the Making of the Stalinist Subject in the Kremlin Screening Room, 1934–1936 Research Presentation, SEEELC Conference on Stalinism, UCLA.

2025

Palatal Violence: Sound, Identity, and Enemy-Making in the Russo-Ukrainian War. SEEELC Linguistic Festival, UCLA.

What Can We Learn from Fascists...? Panel Organizer, ASEEES Convention, Washington, D.C.

Narrative Power: Public Space as a Site of Dialogue. Public Talk and Panel, Wende Museum, Los Angeles, California.

Living Things: Identity Cages, Commodified Selves, and the Politics of Becoming-With . Panel, Human Rights Framework/Global Solidarities Conference, UC Davis
Total Kiss: Romantic Biophilia, Relational Ontology, and the Ecological Imagination… CGS/GSC Colloquium, Stanford University
Biophilia . Ecofilm Screening: 1) at the Multispecies Salon, UCLA; 2) at the Queer Kinship Network International Conference, University of Oxford.
New Materialisms . Presentation, Cybercene Lab, UCLA
2024
Critical Perspectives on Emerging Forms of Global Solidarities. Panel, Institute for Criminological and Sociological Research, Belgrade, Serbia
2023

New East Cinema Symposium . Roundtable, Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Pittsburgh
War in Ukraine. Peace Advocacy . Panel, 16BEAVER, New York.
2022
Community Fundraiser on Conflict Resolution Panel , Los Angeles, CA
Beneath The Surface with Suzi Weissman . KRFL Radio, Los Angeles. Interview on marginalization in Eastern Ukraine.
2014
Against Censorship: Independent Media in Authoritarian Contexts . Public talk, Bowdoin College, Maine
Language and Violence: Nationalism and Identity in Post-Maidan Ukraine . Panel, Ukrainian Writers’ Forum, Donetsk
2009
Henry Miller vs the National Expert Commission on Public Morality . Intervention performance, Ukrainian Parliament, Kyiv
Media EXPERIENCE

2021–22 — Head of Media, Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, Kyiv . Directed international initiatives on hate, trauma, and memory politics; produced multilingual public-facing documentaries; developed media strategies for dialogue around contested histories.

2022–24 — Media Analyst and Team Leader, Productive Playhouse, Los Angeles . Co-led a 365-person multilingual team analyzing antisemitism, hate speech, and extremist content for Google/YouTube; designed cross-linguistic detection schemas for covert propaganda; contributed to the content-safety protocols by which automated systems are trained to classify meaning across languages.
2022–24 — Producer, Dose of Society, Los Angeles . Field interviews and documentary narratives on social polarization and community repair; a platform with 2M+ followers and partnerships with Universal and Greenpeace.
2000–Present — DADAKINDER, Looo.ch, SHO, PROZA, X3M. Founded and edited major Ukrainian cultural media platforms; award-winning documentary practice across marginalized communities, political ethnography, and post-Soviet memory; 50K+ combined following.
Marginalized Communities & Social Justice:

My First Memory of Color (2018) . On racial identity formation through personal narratives.
Homeless Angels (2017) . Portrait of unhoused in LA.
Queerland (2016–2018): Church Of Fun, Fickle Wish, In the Womb of a Dragon. Portraits of DIY queer spaces.
American Revolution (2016–2021): I Am Somebody, I Am Revolutionary, Women’s March, George Floyd Rebellion, American Democratic Regime, Blacklight, Women’s Strike. Political ethnography.
Russian American (2012–2015): Wonderland, Dima, Dunsama, Angel. Intimate portraits of post-Soviet diaspora life in NY and LA.

Environmental Storytelling:
Biophilia (2025). On multispecies entanglement.
DOCUMENTARY FILMS

Violence, Ideology, Extremism:

We Kill Them Out Of Love (2024). Archival doc on genocidal rhetoric in Russian state media.
Manifesto (2021) . Affective video montage for the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center.
Elliot Rodger Here (2014) . On masculinity and violence through digital traces of the Isla Vista killings.
My New Orthodox Video (2013) . On nationalism and self-mythology in post-Soviet digital space.
Memory, Trauma & Historical Violence:
Because We Are Men Not Beasts (2021) . Tribute to Thomas Sankara and the anti-colonial struggle.
Black Man In A Red Suit (2021) . On Black representation in Soviet cinema.
Other (2023). Reframes Soviet propaganda through a postcolonial lens.

>>> FILM ARCHIVE
Public WRITING

2025: How a Channel Islands Expedition Brought Environmental Humanities Vividly To Life, UCLA News.
On multispecies kinship, green pedagogy, and eco-research.
2024: To Blow (Up) the Mausoleum, Daraja Press.
On post-Soviet political mythology and affective memory.
2022: The Superfluous People Of Eastern Ukraine, LeftEast
Die Überflüssigen Menschen Aus Der Ostukraine, Widerspruch.
On marginalization, displacement, and identity in war-torn regions.

>>> TEXT ARCHIVE
Books and Multimedia

2012 — Fuhrer of God (Looo.ch, New York)
On political theology and patriarchal violence through experimental critical theory.
2012 — Queer Textbooks Series (Looo.ch, New York)
Satirical visual texts critiquing queerphobia, censorship, and moral panic in Russia and Ukraine.
2007 — Slam! Theory and Practice of Poetic Revolution (Chili, Kyiv)
Manifesto and cultural analysis of the spoken word movement in the post-Soviet literary scene.
MEDIA FEATURES

Feature: Censored After Satirizing Anti-Gay Laws, Gawker Ukrainische Unmoral, Vice / Motherboard Documenting Homelessness, Knife Media Jazz Funeral in New Orleans, ViaNolaVie Lesbianism and War Games, Global Voices The Captors of the World, Bird in Flight
Coverage: My First Memory of Color, Fotodemic
Selected Interviews: Shocker Man. Anatoli Ulyanov, Vlashchenko Impossible Interview from Ukraine, LeftEast On Censorship, Morality, and Resistance, Art Ukraine Sovok Is a Part of Us, Novoye Vremya See You on the Moon, Detector.Media
Report: Censor Over Satirical Gayart PDF File, Animal Russians Censor Website, Techdirt
Memberships

American Anthropological Association (AAA)

Populism Specialist Group, Political Studies Association (UK)

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)
Modern Language Association (MLA)
Languages

Russian: Native proficiency

Ukrainian: Native proficiency

English: Full professional proficiency
ULYANOV@UCLA.EDU
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