Ljudmila Bilkić holds a B.A. in German and History of Art and Architecture from Middlebury College, an M.A. in German Studies from the University of Pittsburgh, and is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of German. Her dissertation focuses on New Media works that challenge the definition of illegal migration within the imagined and consistently changing borders of Europe. Her research interests also include New German Cinema, the early Soviet avant-garde, as well as the cinematic treatment of Socialist and Communist nostalgia in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.