[1] His writings encompass Russian literature and intellectual history, the philosophy of religion, the creation of new ideas in the age of electronic media, semiotics, and interdisciplinary approaches in the humanities.

Epstein also began to explore Moscow's underground poetry and art scene of the 1970s, developing a lifelong interest in conceptualism, metarealism, and the cross-cultural interplay of ideas.

[6] Upon his return to Emory, Epstein taught a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses in subjects ranging from literary theory, semiotics, and intellectual history to 19th-and 20th-century Russian literature.

[8] In the second half of the 1990s, as the World Wide Web rapidly permeated both academic and popular culture, Epstein embraced the new medium for cross-cultural communication.

According to Epstein, the first wave of Russian postmodernism harkened back to Soviet-era socialist realism of the 1930s-1950s, which opposed the "obsolete" aesthetic individualism of modernism, erased distinctions between elite and mass culture, and tried to construct a post-historical space where all the great discourses of the past could be merged and resolved.

It was not until the late 1950s and again the 1970s that Soviet artists and writers such as Ilya Kabakov, Vitaly Komar, Aleksandr Melamid, Dmitri Prigov, Vsevolod Nekrasov, and others turned a distinctly postmodern, playful, ironic gaze toward the ideological simulations of socialist realism (heroic workers, collective struggle, communal apartment, the glorious communist future, etc.).

Advanced from different angles by thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Juri Lotman, and Sergei Averintsev, culturology investigates, describes, and links diverse cultural phenomena previously approached from separate fields such as history, philosophy, sociology, literary and art criticism.

[16] Epstein built on the foundation of culturology with his conception of transculturalism, a conscious liberation from the strictures of one's own specific, inherently incomplete culture and cultivation of a radical openness toward and dialogue with others.

"[17] Transculture acknowledges the need to see the self in the other, allowing the multiplication of possible worlds, a boundless fluidity of discourses, values, and knowledge systems that would embrace difference rather than seek to obliterate it.

[18] Epstein held similar "collective brainstorming" events as laboratory models of transcultural activity at Bowling Green State University (1996),[19] the international conference "The Future of the Humanities.

[citation needed] Epstein's research on post-Soviet Russian cultural and spiritual conditions brought him to the concept of "minimal religion", a phenomenon of post-atheist religiosity originating in the first country to experience 70 years of mass, state-sanctioned atheism.

[21] In abandoning atheism, these "minimal believers" seek to fill a spiritual void with a holistic view of God, above and beyond the historic divisions and prescriptive rituals of organized religion.

His term "poor faith" refers not to inadequacy but freedom from the material trappings of traditional religions: possessions, buildings, ritual objects, and intermediaries between the individual and God.

"[24] According to Epstein, an educational program uniting major fields of the humanities could be established under the acronym PILLAR: philosophy, intellectual history, language, literature, art, religion.

Constructively, transhumanities might include building new intellectual communities, initiating new artistic movements, creating new modes of communication, and developing new paradigms of thought, rather than simply studying or criticizing the products of culture.

[26] Freed from externally imposed cultural imperatives, humanities programs could expand their scope of research into areas more attuned to the techno-scientific challenges of the twenty-first century.

Along this path, "thinkable worlds" emerge—philosophical systems, religious and artistic movements, life orientations, new words, terms and concepts, new disciplines and forms of humanitarian research.

[30] Expanding his "transformative" and "possibilistic" methodology,  Epstein developed a project of "synthetic", or constructive philosophy, in contrast to the analytic tradition dominant in modern Western thought.

Accordingly, philosophy as a study of the general principles of the universe becomes a prerequisite in any "world-forming", synthesizing acts of technology, including the design of computer games and multi-populated virtual worlds (e.g., "Second Life" and "Meta"), that involve a new ontology, logic, ethics, and axiology.

His own term for this process of word-creation is "Lexicopeia", a literary genre that involves combining specific morphemes into new, meaningful words for previously undefined concepts.

Epstein argues that the contrast and interplay between these two tendencies—generalization, totalitarianism, and utopianism versus individualization, personalism, and conceptualism--define the peculiar character of Russian thought and its contribution to world philosophy.

Rather than develop their own civilizational project for Russia, Vladimir Putin and his allies define the "Russian world" only as an "anti-world": a negation of the West and all it stands for.