Olga Shevchenko has lived in Moscow, Warsaw and Philadelphia, and is currently teaching sociology at Williams College. She is interested in everyday life, consumption, Soviet and post-Soviet culture, memory and photography. She is currently involved, with Oksana Sarkisova, in a collaborative research project entitled Snapshot Histories: Family Photography and Generational Memories of Socialism in Russia.
Her previous book, Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow, dealt with the changing structures of daily life in the late 1990s’ Moscow. It received the 2009 Heldt prize by the Association of Women in Slavic Studies and the 2010 Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.
Review of Crisis and the Everyday
- “Bread and circuses: Shifting frames and changing references in the ordinary Muscovites’ political talk,” in Communist and Post-Communist Studies 34:1, 2001
- “In case of fire emergency”: Consumption, security, and the meaning of durables in a transforming society.” Journal of Consumer Culture 2:2, 2002
- “Between the holes: Emerging identities and hybrid patterns of consumption in post-socialist Russia.” Europe-Asia Studies, v. 54, no.6, September 2002
- “Conflict traditions in Western sociology: Main themes and interpretations of Marx and Weber” (in Russian), in Yu Davydov, ed., The New and the Old in Theoretical Sociology (Moscow: ISRAN), 2003
- “From socialist camp to a global village? Globalization and the imaginary landscapes of postsocialism” (with Y. Schukin), in L. McCann, ed., Russian Transformations: Challenging the Global Narrative (London: Routledge), 2004
- “The politics of nostalgia: A case for comparative analysis of postsocialist practices” (with Nadkarni, M.). Ab Imperio: Theory and History of Nationalities and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Realm, vol. 2, 2004.
- “Searching for the populus in popular culture.” Social Identities, vol. 13, no. 5, 2007. Co-authored with Maya Nadkarni.
- “Wiggle Your Wits”: Social restructuring and the transformation of entertainment genres in Russia.” Social Identities, vol. 13, no. 5, 2007
- “’Nationals’” and “’expatriates’”: Challenges of fulfilling ‘sans frontières’ (“without borders”) ideals in international humanitarian action.” Health & Human Rights 10 (1), 2008. Co-authored with Renée C. Fox.
- Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow (Indiana U. Press, 2009).