Areas of Expertise and Scholary Interest:
Russian literature and culture (19th and 20th centuries), gender studies, Gulag history, memory and trauma studies.

I am deeply interested in how cultures remember (it's a different process in different cultures) and in what they forget. Every time you remember something, you also forget something, and I explore how this works for cultures as well as for individuals. Russia is a terrific point of comparison for theories and models based on Western and Eastern ideas as Russia--both perceptually and geographically--is between East and West. I have studied such intersections in a number of ways; currently, I am working on a project based on interviews with survivors of the Gulag. Eventually that will be a book, the working title of which is: "A Dog Named Stalin: Memory, Trauma, and the Gulag."

Publications:
Co-editor with Barbara Norton, An Improper Professor: Women, Gender and Journalism in Late Imperial Russia (Duke 2001); A History of Women's Writing in Russia, co-edited with Adele Barker (Cambridge University Press 2002); Russian Women, 1698-1917: Experience and Expression. An Anthology of Sources, co-edited with Robin Bisha, Christine Holden and William Wagner (Indiana University Press 2002). I've published a number of articles on Russian authors, including "The Superfluous Man and the Necessary Woman: A Re-vision," and the introduction to The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova, and to Michael Katz' translation of Evgeniia Tur's "Antonina;" Finding the Middle Ground: Krestovsky, Tur, and the Power of Ambivalence in Nineteenth-Century Women's Prose (Northwestern, 2004).

Courses Taught:
"Russian Fiction and Film;" "Russian Culture in the Era of Terror" (cross-listed with History); "Art and Dissidence: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Stanley Kubrick" (cross-listed with English); "The Beat Generation and the Russian New Wave" (cross-lissted with English) as well as courses on cross-cultural feminisms and a course on globalization.

I co-direct International Comparative Studies (formerly Comparative Area Studies), an undergraduate interdisciplinary major for students interested in cultures outside the United States and in comparative work. I have directed the Changing Faces of Russia FOCUS program since 1999 and I regularly teach in that program.