Dissertation: Western Models of Sexuality in Russian Modernism.
I grew up in Leningrad, USSR. After attending the high-school Number 239 in Leningrad, I studied Russian literature and linguistics at Tartu University, Estonia (M.A., 1990), and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D., 1998). In Tartu, my research focused on the study of the Russian literature of the eighteenth century (I published essays on Nikolai Karamzin and on the genre of solemn ode); in Berkeley, my scholarly interests shifted to Russian Symbolist culture and, thematically, to sexuality as an aspect of cultural history.
Since 1999, I have been teaching at Reed College in Portland, Oregon http://academic.reed.edu/russian/ (web.reed.edu), where I am now Associate Professor of Russian and Chair of the Russian department. At Reed, I have offered courses on Pushkin, Tolstoy, twentieth-century Russian literature, Russian and European Symbolism, Soviet and post-Soviet culture, and on Russian film. I also teach intermediate and advanced Russian. I have organized a number of conferences at Reed, including “Music and Terror in Stalinist Russia,” “Memory and the Past in Postsocialist Cultures,” and “Understanding Russian Culture through Film.” I have held the Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University (2001-02) and the Kone Fellowship at the Collegium for Advanced Studies, Helsinki University, Finland (2004 and 2005).
Since graduating from Berkeley, I have published more than two dozen essays and book chapters in both English and Russian (the full-text versions of my several works can be found here: http://academic.reed.edu/russian/bershtein/index.html.) Currently I am revising a book manuscript entitled “Bereg zhelaniia”: zapadnye kontsepstsii seksual’nosti v russkoi kul’ture epokhi moderna for the Moscow publishing house NLO. I am also working on new project exploring Sergei Eisenstein’s erotic theories and their role in his artistic practice.
For more, see: http://academic.reed.edu/russian/professors.html