About
Rusana Novikova is an environmental anthropologist, documentarian, and podcaster. She is currently a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she researches the afterlives of socialist industrialization in Russia's Asian periphery. Her dissertation examines the long-term ecological transformations and evolving human-nonhuman interactions within the post-industrial, abandoned landscapes of Russia's Far East that have recently become an arena for the Far Eastern Hectare, a state-sponsored land development and resettlement campaign. This project was supported by grants from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the John L. Simpson Research Fellowship, the UC Berkeley Institute of International Studies, and the Institute for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, among others.
Before Berkeley, she worked as a translator and localization specialist in San Francisco. She received her Master's in Sociocultural Anthropology from the European University at St. Petersburg and her Bachelor's in Linguistics and Translation from Tomsk Polytechnic University.
Published Work
Rusana Novikova's website