About
Prof. Shevchenko teaches and does research on the issues of memory, photography, culture and consumption in post-socialist Russia. Her most recent book, In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos (MIT Press, 2023), co-authored with Oksana Sarkisova, looks at Soviet-era domestic photo archives as moving targets of the Russian state’s memory politics, as well as points of contestation and possibility for the generational and individual efforts to grapple with the past. A brief outline of this project, alongside with some photos, can be found in the essay they wrote for the New York Times. Shevchenko’s first book is Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow (Indiana UP, 2009). A volume on memory and photography she edited, Double Exposure, came out with Routledge in 2014. Her other research and teaching interests include: ethnographic theater, everyday life, political talk, the lived experience of late socialism and culture of consumption in comparative perspective.
Education
B.A. Moscow State University (1996)
M.A. Central European University (1997)
Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania (2002)
Courses
- ANSO 205 (F) SEM Ways of Knowing
- SOC 236/AMST 236/ARTH 237/ENGL 237 SEM Making Things Visible: Adventures in Documentary Work (not offered 2026/27)
- SOC 315 SEM Culture, Consumption and Modernity (not offered 2026/27)
- SOC 317 TUT The Public and the Private (not offered 2026/27)
- SOC 320 SEM Thinking the Family Album (not offered 2026/27)
- SOC 324 SEM Memory and Identity (not offered 2026/27)
- SOC 348/GBST 348/RUSS 348 (S) TUT Altering States: Post-Soviet Paradoxes of Identity and Difference
Publications
- “Bread and circuses: Shifting frames and changing references in the ordinary Muscovites’ political talk” in Communist and Post-Communist Studies 34:1, 2001
- “In case of fire emergency”: Consumption, security, and the meaning of durables in a transforming society” in Journal of Consumer Culture 2:2, 2002
- “Between the holes: Emerging identities and hybrid patterns of consumption in post-socialist Russia” in Europe-Asia Studies, v. 54, no.6, September 2002
- “From socialist camp to a global village? Globalization and the imaginary landscapes of postsocialism” (with Y. Schukin), in L. McCann, ed., Russian Transformations: Challenging the Global Narrative (London: Routledge), 2004
- “The politics of nostalgia: A case for comparative analysis of postsocialist practices” (with Nadkarni, M.) in Ab Imperio: Theory and History of Nationalities and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Realm, vol. 2, 2004.
- “‘Wiggle your wits”: Social restructuring and the transformation of entertainment genres in Russia“in Social Identities 13 (5), 2007.
- “’Nationals’” and “’expatriates’”: Challenges of fulfilling ‘sans frontières’ (“without borders”) ideals in international humanitarian action” in Health & Human Rights 10 (1), 2008. Co-authored with Renée C. Fox.
- “Soviet past in amateur photography: The work of memory and oblivion” (in Russian, with Sarkisova, O.) Otechestvennye Zapiski, no 4 (43), 2008.
- Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow (Indiana U. Press, 2009). Winner of a prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies; also winner of the 2010 Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies.
- “ ‘They came, shot everyone, and that’s the end of it:’ Local memory, amateur photography and the legacy of state violence in Novocherkassk” (with O. Sarkisova) in Slavonica, vol. 17, no. 2, 2011.
- “Socialism” in Encyclopedia of Globalization (ed. George Ritzer). Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
- “Reaching Out to the Homeless and Street Children of Moscow” and “Confronting TB in Siberian Prisons” (both with R.C. Fox), in Fox, Renee C., Doctors Without Borders: Humanitarian Quests, Impossible Dreams of Médecins Sans Frontières. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.
- Double Exposure: Memory and Photography (Transaction Publishers, 2014).
- “The politics of nostalgia in the aftermath of socialism’s collapse: A case for comparative analysis” (with M. Nadkarni) in O. Ange and D. Berliner, eds., Anthropology and Nostalgia. Berghahn Books, 2015.
- “Resisting Resistance: Everyday life, practical competence and neoliberal rhetoric in postsocialist Russia” in Everyday Life in Russia: Past and Present (eds. Choi Chatterjee, David L. Ransel, Mary Cavender, and Karen Petrone). Indiana University Press, 2015.
- ‘The mirror with a memory’: Placing photography in memory studies” in Trever Hagen, Annalisa Tota (eds.). Routledge Handbook of Memory Studies. London: Routledge, 2015.
- “Awful Crisis Superstar: Disasters and Routinization” in Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa, no. 2(2015)
- “Photographs and Their Many Lives” in Slavic Review 76:1 (2017).
- “Remembering Life in the Soviet Union, One Family Photo at a Time,” The New York Times, December 27, 2017.
- “Putting the Public into the Public Goods: Space Wars in a Post-Soviet Dacha Community” in John Bailyn, Dijana Jelaca, and Danijela Lugaric (eds.) The Futures of (Post)Socialism. SUNY Press, 2018.
- “Soviet Heroes and Jewish Victims: One Family’s Memories of WWII” (with Oksana Sarkisova) in Silke Arnold-de Simine and Joanne Leal (eds.) Picturing the Family: Media, Narrative, Memory. Bloomsbury, 2018.
- “The Album as Performance: Notes on the Limits of the Visible” (with Oksana Sarkisova) in Julie Buckler, Julie Cassiday, and Boris Wolfson (eds.) Russian Performances and Their Intellectual Genealogies. University of Wisconsin Press, 2018.