Eric Naiman

Member-At-Large, 2017-2018

Eric Naiman teaches Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.  He is the author of Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Soviet Ideology (Princeton, 1997) and Nabokov, Perversely (Cornell, 2010), as well as the co-editor of The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space (Washington, 2003 with Evgeny Dobrenko) and Everyday Life in Revolutionary Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside  (Indiana, 2005 with Christina Kiaer). A graduate of Amherst College, Yale Law School, and the University of California, Berkeley, Naiman taught for two years at the University of Colorado before returning to Berkeley in 1992.  A department chair  (Comparative Literature, Slavic) for seven years, Naiman has served on the Executive Board of Berkeley’s Institute for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies and is currently a member of the campus Academic Freedom committee.  Prior to obtaining his Ph.D., Naiman clerked for Judge Rya Zobel of the Federal District Court in Boston and was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar.  Naiman’s current projects include Working Through Nabokov (a series of readings of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Proust inflected by Nabokov), and a monograph on Andrei Platonov. Recent Publications include “Kalganov” (SEEJ), “Tolstoy’s Hinges” (Stanford Slavic Studies), “When Nabokov Writes Badly” (Russian Review) and “Their Mutual Friend: On the Trail of the Woman Who Introduced Dickens to Dostoevsky” (TLS).  He is currently a member of the Editorial Board of Slavic Review and Nabokov-On-Line Journal (NOJ).