Dr Rebecca Reich

Fellow, Director of Studies in Modern and Medieval Languages (Part II)
University Positions
University Associate Professor of Russian Literature and Culture
Specialising in
Slavonic Studies

Rebecca Reich is a University Associate Professor of Russian literature and culture. 

Academic interests

Rebecca Reich's academic interests include:

  • 20th century Russian literature, film, music and popular culture
  • Intellectual and cultural history
  • The history of science, medicine, print culture, and law
  • Samizdat and dissent
  • Law and humanities.

Degrees obtained

  • BA, Yale.
  • PhD, Harvard.

Biography

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 is a study of literary journalism in the post-Stalin period supported in 2019-20 by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.

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 2008She 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.

Department link

https://www.mml.cam.ac.uk

Publications, links and resources

Books

  • Reich, R. (2018) State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin. De Kalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press.

Book chapters 

  • Reich, R. (2015) Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Russian Variations on a Psychiatric Theme. In: Psychiatry in Communist Europe, ed, S. Marks and M. Savelli, London: Palgrave MacMillan, pp 196-215.

Articles

  • Reich, R. (2014) Inside the Psychiatric Word: Diagnosis and Self-Definition in the Late Soviet Period. Slavic Review 73 (3) pp 563–84.
  • Reich, R. (2013) Madness as Balancing Act in Joseph Brodsky’s ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’. The Russian Review 72 (1) pp 45–65.

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