Mieka Erley

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merley

Mieka Erley

Associate Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies; Director, Russian and Eurasian Studies Program

Department/Office Information

Russian & Eurasian Studies
309A Lawrence Hall
  • T 2:45pm - 4:30pm (309A Lawrence Hall)
  • W 1:30pm - 2:45pm (309A Lawrence Hall)

Mieka Erley received her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in Slavic Languages and Literatures with a minor in Film Studies. She studies the cultural history, literature, and cinema of the late Imperial and Soviet periods in relation to science, materiality, and the environment. Her interests are trans-regional and trans-medial, and her work seeks to engage Slavic Studies with conversations across traditional geographic and disciplinary boundaries. 

Her first book, On Russian Soil: Myth and Materiality (Ithaca, NY: NIUP/CUP, 2021) follows the shifting significance of soil as a natural body, a national resource, and a site of cultural mythmaking over a century of modernization in Russia and Central Asia. On Russian Soil was shortlisted for the 2021 AATSEEL Best First Book Award. In addition to her primary training in Slavic languages and literatures, she has secondary training in Tajik (Persian) and studied with Azim Baizoyev through ACTR and Tajik National University. 

She is currently working on her second book, Prehistories of the Posthuman, which reevaluates Russian cosmism in light of contemporary post-humanist theory. Her articles can be found in Slavic Review, the Russian journal Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (NLO), the French literary journal Europe, and the edited volumes Eurasian Environments and Petersburg/Petersburg. She is a member of the international working group Russian Ecospheres and serves on the editorial board of the series "East European and Eurasian Ecologies: Past, Present, and Future" at Academic Studies Press. 

Mieka Erley on Academia

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures 
Minor in Film Studies 


M.A., University of California, Berkeley
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Awarded with Distinction

B.A., Hampshire College

Tajik National University, Dushanbe, Tajikistan
Herzen State University, St. Petersburg, Russia
 

 

On Russian Soil: Myth and Materiality. Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2021.

 

“Obmen veshchestv’ – The Russian and Soviet Concept of Metabolism and Beyond.” Interdisciplinary Conceptual History Forum [Expected Spring 2023]

“The Human Colony: Symbiogenesis and Sympoiesis in the Works of A. Bogdanov and K. Merezhkovskii.” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (NLO) 179 (2023): 87-100. [In Russian]

“Models of Soil and Society: The Legacy of Justus Liebig in Russia and the Soviet Union.” In Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Eurasian History, edited by Nicholas Breyfogle, 133-146. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018.

“A Critique of “Armchair” Science: Nikolai Fedorov’s Cosmist Utopia as Malthusian Thought Experiment.” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (NLO) 132 (2015): 201-215. [In Russian]

“The Dialectics of Nature in Kara-Kum’: Andrei Platonov’s Dzhan as the Environmental History of a Future Utopia.”Slavic Review 73 (2014): 727-750.

[Available in French translation by Jean-Baptiste Para: “La dialectique de la nature dans le Kara-Koum.” in Europe: revue littéraire mensuelle 98, no. 1097-1098 (2020): 189-217.]

“Meat in Russia’s Modernist Imagination.” In Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900-1921, edited by Olga Matich, 262-282. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010.
 

Public Scholarship:

Film review of Optical Axis (Opticheskaia os’) by Marina Razbezhkina. Kinokultura: New Russian Cinema 50 (2015). http://www.kinokultura.com/2015/50/50r-optical-axis.shtml.

Film review of The Seal of King Solomon (Pechat’ tsaria Solomona) by Vladlen Barbe. Kinokultura: New Russian Cinema 45 (2014). http://www.kinokultura.com/2014/45r-pechat_solomona.shtml.

“Anatomizing Modernity,” Digital Humanities Project “Mapping Petersburg,” ed. Olga Matich (2004).

“Sochi’s Winter Olympics.” Newsletter of the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 24, no. 3 (2007): 3-5.

“Petersburg Online: A Web-based Cultural Resource for Students and Teachers of Russian.” Berkeley Language Center Newsletter 23, no. 1 (2007): 7-8.

“US Military Involvement in Central Asia: ‘The Price of Freedom’?” and “US Government Spending in Central Asia: A Military-Civil Society Primer.” Give and Take: A Journal on Civil Society in Eurasia 5, no. 2/3 (2002): 9-13.

Translator, “In a Turn to the Past, Moscow Proposes to Reverse Siberia’s Rivers,” by Irina Zherelina. Give and Take: A Journal on Civil Society in Eurasia 6, no. 2 (2003): 10-11.

Soviet cultural history, literature, cinema, environmental humanities and history, new materialism, STS, and post-humanist theory