Jesus College Jesus Lane Cambridge CB5 8BL United Kingdom
Professor Reich received her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University and her BA in Russian from Yale College. She is the Consultant Editor for Russia, East-Central Europe and Eurasia at the Times Literary Supplement and was previously Arts Editor and Books Editor of The Moscow Times. Her articles and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum, The Forward, The New Leader, The Moscow Times, and other publications.
Professor Reich’s primary teaching interests lie in twentieth-century Russian and Soviet literature and culture, but she also teaches across a historical range stretching from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. She has a strong teaching interest in interdisciplinary approaches, in particular the intersections of literature and social, intellectual and cultural history.
As a scholar of twentieth-century Russian culture, Professor Reich explores the history of journalism, dissent and samizdat; the interface of literature and law; and literary engagements with scientific and medical knowledge, particularly psychiatry.
Professor Reich’s current book project, The Higher Court: Soviet Journalism and Justice, 1953-1991, traces the emergence and evolution of experientially grounded ways of writing that claimed jurisdiction over questions of morality and legality and reconfigured the relationship between journalism and the law for the post-Stalin era. The project was supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2019-20 and an article emerging from this research, entitled “Words on Trial: Morality and Legality in Frida Vigdorova’s Journalism”, appeared in Slavic Review in 2022.
Professor Reich’s first monograph, State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), examines the interaction of psychiatric and literary discourses from the 1950s to the 1980s. It demonstrates that longstanding tensions between literature and psychiatry came to a head in the post-Stalin period and subsequent decades as dissenters tested cultural norms and the state suppressed dissent through punitive hospitalization. Drawing on published and unpublished texts, original archival research and interviews, it casts new light on dissenting writers and exposes the intensely literary orientation of psychiatrists during this period. The American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) awarded State of Madness the prize for Best First Book and named it a finalist for the prize for Best Book in Literary Scholarship.
Together with Professor Simon Franklin and Professor Emma Widdis, Professor Reich is a co-editor of The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2024), for which she also co-wrote the Introduction and a chapter on ‘The Madman’. With contributions from thirty-four world-leading scholars, The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature offers a fresh and authoritative approach to literary history, not as one integral narrative but as multiple parallel histories. Each of its four strands tells a story of Russian literature according to a defined criterion: Movements, Mechanisms, Forms, and Heroes. In dialogue, these histories invite a multiplicity of readings, both within and across the narrative strands. In an age of shifting perspectives on Russia, and on national literatures more widely, The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature engages both with traditional literary concerns and with radical re-conceptualisations of Russian history and culture.
Professor Reich welcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students with research interests or approaches that are relevant to her own.
Books
The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature, edited by Simon Franklin, Rebecca Reich and Emma Widdis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024).
State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018).
Selected Articles and Book Chapters
“The Madman”, in The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature, edited by Simon Franklin, Rebecca Reich and Emma Widdis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024).
“Introduction”, in The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature, edited by Simon Franklin, Rebecca Reich and Emma Widdis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024).
“Words on Trial: Morality and Legality in Frida Vigdorova’s Journalism.” Slavic Review 81, no. 2 (Fall 2022): 349–69.
"Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Russian Variations on a Psychiatric Theme”, in Psychiatry in Communist Europe, edited by Sarah Marks and Mat Savelli (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 196–215.
“Inside the Psychiatric Word: Diagnosis and Self-Definition in the Late Soviet Period.” Slavic Review 73, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 563–84.
"Madness as Balancing Act in Joseph Brodsky’s ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov.’” The Russian Review 72, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 45–65.
