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Gender and the body in contemporary Russian culture
9 June - 29 June 2024
Biography
I am an interdisciplinary scholar of Russian culture whose publications have encompassed a broad range of historical epochs—from the nineteenth century to the present day—as well as genres and media, including, drama, prose, film, and television. I established my reputation within the field of Slavic Studies as a specialist in gender and Russian culture, the representation of maternity in particular. My first book, Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture (Northwestern UP, 2014), received the Heldt Prize for Best Book in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Gender Studies.
For the past eight years, my research has primarily focused on Russian culture since 1991, exploring the profound transformations of post-Soviet Russian society through a multidisciplinary prism. As in my earlier work on motherhood and Russian culture across several centuries, I employ a cultural-historical approach that allows the exploration of the central question recurring throughout my scholarship: how do dominant cultural myths mutate—or, alternatively, remain constant—during periods of pronounced societal change?
My latest book, Haunted Dreams: Fantasies of Adolescence in Post-Soviet Culture (Cornell University Press, NIUP Imprint, 2022) is the first comprehensive study in English devoted to cultural representations of adolescence in Russia since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. It is also the first book-length study to situate these post-Soviet cultural representations within the broader context of European and Anglo-American scholarship on adolescence and youth. Through close analysis of prose, drama, television, and film, this book maps how the adolescent hero has become a locus for multiple anxieties, as well as a background for the projection of fervent hopes, throughout the tumultuous years since the end of the Soviet experiment. Haunted Dreams was recently awarded the International Research Society for Children’s Literature 2023 Book Prize.
My current research focuses on folk ritual and the female body in contemporary Russian film and drama.
Project Summary
I will spend three weeks at the University of Bristol, as a Next Generation Visiting Researcher, to advance my current research on gender and the body in contemporary Russian culture and to cultivate collaborative partnerships with scholars both within my primary field of Slavonic Studies (Dr. Connor Doak) and my secondary specialization in Gender Studies (Prof. Natalie Edwards).
1. With Dr. Doak, a co-edited special issue of Slavic Literatures focusing on gender and the body against the backdrop of Russia’s war in Ukraine, with solicited contributions from scholars working across the region, including on Ukraine and Belarus. Doak’s specialization on masculinities and war, and my own work on womanhood and motherhood puts us in a strong position to coedit the volume. We will issue a call for contributions by late 2023, and the issue will have a proposed publication date of 2025. During the stay in Bristol Dr. Doak and I will collaboratively draft the introduction and begin preparing the submissions for the peer review process.
2. With Prof. Edwards, plans for an international conference, to be held either in Bristol or California, on the topic of “Transnational Research on Gender and Corporeality: New Trends.” We will work on securing funding for this conference by applying for a Seed Grant for International Activities, awarded annually by the Global Affairs Division at UC-Davis. We will also begin the process of institutionalizing an ongoing collaboration/partnership between the University of Bristol and UC-Davis, by initiating an Agreement of Cooperation through Global Affairs
Lectures and Seminars
Adolescence as Nightmare in Contemporary Russian Culture
Ashworth Lecture Room (A Block A.01), Priory Road Complex
5.15pm, Thursday 13 June 2024
The Soviet Union was a land of heroes, among whom adolescents occupied pride of place. The Soviet Union, we might even say, loved dead adolescents, relying heavily on them to promote the militaristic and sacrificial mythology upon which Soviet culture rested. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian adolescents have had their revenge—on screen, at least. Russian film production, particularly during the 2010s, has featured an unusually large number of teenagers behaving in audaciously amoral, even murderous ways. How can we understand this eruption of on-screen teenage aggression? This talk attempts to answer this question through a close analysis of one particular murderous teen: the main protagonist of Kirill Serebrennikov’s 2016 film The Student, as well as the earlier theatrical production at Moscow’s Gogol Center, also directed by Serebrennikov, upon which the film was based.
Cracking the Academic Jobmarket: The US Version
Lecture Room 8, 21 Woodland Road, Arts Complex
2pm, Monday 24 June 2024
This workshop is designed for postgraduate students and early-career researchers in the Arts & Humanities who are interested in applying for academic jobs or building an academic career in the USA. The USA is an academic powerhouse and many postgrads in the UK apply for jobs in American universities. While there are many commonalities between UK and US academic culture, there are also major differences. This workshop will help you navigate those differences, to prepare an application for a job at a US university, from the documents that you need to prepare to the campus visit and negotiating an offer.
Details of Professor Kaminer's lectures and seminars will be posted on the Events page , you can contact Professor Kaminer's host, Dr Connor Doak, for further information.
