Vassili Schedrin is an archivist, librarian, and research coordinator of Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the USSR at Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Jewish History at the Department of History at Queen’s University in Canada. He teaches and studies a variety of topics related to cultural history of Russian Jews from the eighteenth to the twenty first centuries. He is an author of Jewish Souls, Bureaucratic Minds: Jewish Bureaucracy and Policymaking in Late Imperial Russia, 1850-1917 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016) and a co-author of In America non ci sono Zar. Le relazioni russo-statunitensi: questione ebraica e nascita della diplomazia umanitaria (1880- 1914) [There is no Tsar in America. Russian-US Relations: the Jewish Question and the Birth of Humanitarian Diplomacy (1880-1914)] (Firenze: Le Lettere, 2021). His current project is a biography of Solomon Mikhoels, the brightest star of Soviet Yiddish theater and a virtual symbol of Soviet Jews. This project is situated at the intersection of academic scholarship and theatrical performance of archival research and playwriting.