Lida Oukaderova is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Art History at Rice. She teaches introductory courses in global film history as well as advanced seminars that explore cinema in relation to architecture and urban history, discourses of justice, and theories of gender and sexuality. 

Her research focuses on the cinemas of the Soviet republics and post-Soviet nations. She is the author of The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw: Space, Materiality, Movement (Indiana University Press, 2017), which examines shifting conceptions of space in Soviet film of the 1950s and 1960s. Situating cinema within the political and cultural transformations of the immediate post-Stalin era, the book shows how Soviet films engaged with broader efforts to reorganize public, private, and natural spaces. Film, the book demonstrates, both mirrored and shaped new spatial practices emerging across architecture, interior design, landscape development, and everyday life during the period. The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw was translated into Russian in 2024 by Academic Studies Press. Most recently, Lida edited ReFocus: The Films of Larisa Shepitko (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), which is the first English-language volume dedicated to the internationally renowned Ukraine-born Soviet filmmaker. 

Lida is currently finishing her second book, In Pursuit of the Common: Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema Since the 1960s. The project examines how cinema explores and participates in the creation of “the common”—shared spaces, languages, and forms of experience that can transcend individual identity and group belonging. It argues that while Soviet and post-Soviet filmmakers remained engaged with Soviet commitments to collectivity, they profoundly reimagined its foundations by moving beyond practiced socialist frameworks and forms. The book focuses on cinemas from the former Soviet republics, including Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. 

Books

• In Pursuit of the Common: Soviet and Russian Cinema Since the 1960s. Manuscript in progress.
• The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw: Space, Materiality, Movement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017)

Selected Articles and Essays

• “From Mastery to Indistinction: Nature in Thaw-Era Cinema.” In Masha Shpolberg, ed., Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe. New York: Berghahn, forthcoming 2022.
• “The Convertibility of Meaning: Soviet Readings of Money in the 1920s.” In Festschrift in Honor of Janet Swaffar, Katherine Arens and Maxim Hiram, forthcoming 2022.
• Book review: “From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema Between the Second and the Third World,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinemas, Vol. 15 (2), 2021.
• Book review: “Arctic Cinema and the Documentary Ethos,” Slavic Review, Vol. 80 (1), Spring 2021, 187-89.
• “Revolution through Motion: Soy Cuba, 1964.” In 100 Years of Soviet Cinema, Daniel Fairfax, ed. Melbourne: Leda Tapes Organization, 2019.
• Book review: “Gynny v Parizhe: k metageografii russkoi kul’tury,” Slavic Review, Vol. 77(3), 2018, 843-844.
• “I am Cuba and the Space of the Revolution,” Film and History, 44(2) 2014, 4-21.
• "The Sense of Movement in Georgy Danelia's Walking the Streets of Moscow, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 4(1), 2010, 5-21.
• "Money, Translation and Subjectivty in Isaak Babel's 'Guy de Maupassant." Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 50 (2002-2003) : 161-168.