Olga Shevchenko

Photo of Olga Shevchenko

Paul H. Hunn `55 Professor in Social Studies

413-597-4767
Hollander Hall Rm 315
At Williams since 2003

Education

B.A. Moscow State University (1996)
M.A. Central European University, Society and Politics (1997)
Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, Sociology (2002)

Areas of Expertise

Prof. Shevchenko teaches and does research on the issues of memory, photography, culture and consumption in post-socialist Russia. Her most recent book, In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos (MIT Press, 2023), co-authored with Oksana Sarkisova, looks at Soviet-era domestic photo archives as moving targets of the Russian state’s memory politics, as well as points of contestation and possibility for the generational and individual efforts to grapple with the past. A brief outline of this project, alongside with some photos, can be found in the essay they wrote for the New York Times. Shevchenko’s first book is Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow (Indiana UP, 2009). A volume on memory and photography she edited, Double Exposure, came out with Transaction Publishers in 2014. Her other research and teaching interests include: ethnographic theater, everyday life, political talk, the lived experience of late socialism and culture of consumption in comparative perspective.

Courses

SOC 236 / AMST 236 / ARTH 237 / ENGL 237 SEM

Making Things Visible: Adventures in Documentary Work (not offered 2023/24)

SOC 315 SEM

Culture, Consumption and Modernity (not offered 2023/24)

SOC 317 TUT

The Public and the Private (not offered 2023/24)

SOC 324 SEM

Memory and Identity (not offered 2023/24)

Scholarship/Creative Work