Professor of Russian Jenny Kaminer appointed the Dean’s Office Faculty Advisor for the Arts and Humanities
The key role of this position will be helping to chart a course for the UC Davis Humanities Institute (DHI) during this period of transition. Professor Kaminer will organize a visioning committee to examine and recommend ways for the Institute to have a broader impact within the college as well as across campus and the community, and to raise its profile among peer institutes. In coordination with the DHI Faculty Advisory Board, she will oversee the Institute’s ongoing award funding for faculty and graduate research and support.
In the new position Professor Kaminer, who has been with UC Davis since 2009, will also collaborate with and advise me and the Associate Deans on arts and humanities research and serve as a liaison between the Dean’s office and the arts, humanities, and humanistic social sciences.
Professor Kaminer comes to this position with a body of research that reflects the kind of interdisciplinary and innovative work taking place in the humanities and arts at UC Davis, and for which the College of Letters and Science is known.
Her research into Russian culture cuts across many disciplines and decades: film, television, literature, and drama from 19th century stories to youth culture of 21st century Russia.
Professor Kaminer’s work has examined depictions of maternity and motherhood that she explored deeply in her 2014 book Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture. More recently, she has focused on the transformation of Russian society and culture since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991. Her most recent book, published last year, is Haunted Dreams: Fantasies of Adolescence in Post-Soviet Culture.It is the first comprehensive study in English devoted to cultural representations of adolescence in Russia since the end of the Soviet Union, and also the first in-depth study to situate these post-Soviet cultural representations within the broader context of European and Anglo-American scholarship on adolescence and youth.
Professor Kaminer also serves as chair of the Department of Russian and German and is an affiliated faculty member with the Comparative Literature program.