Jesus College
Jesus Lane
Cambridge
CB5 8BL
United Kingdom
Dr Rebecca Reich is a scholar of twentieth-century Russian literature and culture. Her book State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018) examines the politically fraught interaction of psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin’s death. Her current book project, supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2019-20, is a study of literary journalism in the post-Stalin period with a focus on the work of Frida Vigdorova.
Dr 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 and East-Central Europe at the Times Literary Supplement and was Arts Editor and Books Editor of The Moscow Times from 2003 to 2008. She has contributed book reviews to The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Bookforum, The Forward, The New Leader, The Moscow Times and other publications.
Dr Reich welcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students with research interests relevant to her interests.
Twentieth-century Russian literature and culture.
Twentieth-century Russian literature, film, music and popular culture; literary politics; intellectual and cultural history; the history of science and medicine, particularly psychiatry; samizdat and dissent; journalism and print culture; literary theory; law and humanities.
Books
State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin. De Kalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018.
Book Chapters
"Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Russian Variations on a Psychiatric Theme.” Psychiatry in Communist Europe, edited by Sarah Marks and Mat Savelli (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 196–215.
Articles
“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.
