| Office Location: | 321C Languages Bldg, 133 Franklin Center, Durham, NC 27708 |
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| Ph.D. | Stanford University | 1992 |
| MSW | UNC-Chapel Hill | 2009 |
| MA in Russian Literature | Stanford University, Stanford California | 1987 |
| BA in Russian Literature (summa cum laude) | Boston University, Boston, MA | 1983 |
Current projects: "Voices from the Gulag": will appear in January 2011 from Palgrave MacMillan, Book ms, "A Dog Named Stalin: Memory, Trauma and the Gulag,? is a study of the Gulag based on life-history oral accounts., New research project beginning on the emerging Russian Hospice movement
My book manuscript, "A Dog Named Stalin: Memory, Trauma and the Gulag," is a study of the Gulag based on life-history oral accounts. The analysis is based on multiple interviews I have conducted over five years with fifteen survivors of the Gulag and their children. The study is organized around three themes: 1) the effects of about fifty years of enforced silence on individual memory; 2) the problem of public mourning and memorialization; and 3) an investigation of the ways in which the category of trauma must be modified or altered to suit the Russian context. Because many common ("Western") assumptions about trauma in general, and particularly around trauma and the Holocaust, are not adequate for the Russian context, the exploration of culturally specific reasons for these differences on one of the key contributions made by my study.