Faculty Profiles

Evgenii (Zhenya) Bershtein grew up in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia, and graduated from Tartu University (Estonia). His PhD is from UC Berkeley. He has held research fellowships at Columbia University (2001-02), Helsinki University (2004, 2005), and University of Cambridge (2014). Evgenii Bershtein has published on eighteenth–century Russian poetry, the cultural and intellectual history of Russian modernism, and on Russian film (you can read some of his work here). He has edited the English translation of Yuri Lotman’s Non-Memoirs (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014) and authored the a chapter entitled "Queerness" in the New Cambridge History of Russian Literature  (2024). He is at work on a project entitled Eisenstein, Sexuality, and Decadence and has recently published several papers on this topic. Professor Bershtein teaches classes on twentieth-century Russian literature, Russian and European Symbolism, Soviet and post-Soviet film, contemporary Russia, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Eisenstein, as well as the Russian language at the elementary and advanced levels.