Alexei Yurchak

Dr. Alexei Yurchak teaches Social, Cultural, and Linguistic Anthropology at UC Berkeley.  Yurchak works on late socialism and post-Soviet cultural transformations in Russia, looking at the cultural shifts brought forth by the collapse of the Soviet ideology, state institutions, and centralized economic principles.  He has just completed a book on the gradual transformation of Soviet society during the period of late socialism (1960s-1980s), paying special attention to its manifestations in popular culture and on the shifts un Russian language.