Joy Neumeyer is a historian of Russia and Eastern Europe who specializes in cultural legacies of violence. In 2020, she received a PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley, where her dissertation examined late Soviet culture's fixation on death and despair. She has been a Fulbright Fellow in Russia and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. She has also worked as a reporter in Moscow and Warsaw. Her writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and the American Historical Review. Her first book, A Survivor's Education: Women, Violence, and the Stories We Don't Tell (PublicAffairs, 2024), investigated how domestic abuse has been understood and adjudicated in multiple historical contexts. Her current research project is an examination of the life of Cheka founder Feliks Dzierżyński and the fate of his circle of Polish Communists in the Soviet Union.

Publications:

Books:

• A Survivor’s Education: Women, Violence, and the Stories We Don’t Tell (PublicAffairs, 2024).

Dissertation:

• Dying Empire: Visions of the End in Late Socialism (PhD dissertation completed at UC Berkeley, 2020). ProQuest ID: Neumeyer_berkeley_0028E_19930.

Peer-reviewed articles and book chapters

• “Leonid Brezhnev and the Elixir of Life.” In Energy Culture: Work, Power, and Waste in Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Jillian Porter and Maya Vinokour, Springer Nature, 2023.
• “Darkness at Noon: On History, Narrative, and Domestic Violence.” The American Historical Review, June 2021.
• “Late Socialism as a Time of Weeping: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Vladimir Vysotsky.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, summer 2021.
• “Patriarchal Primitivism: Dying Peasant Women and the Soviet Anti-Developmental Turn.” View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture, summer 2021.

Essays and journalism (selected)

• Poland: Halfway to Democracy. The New York Review of Books, February 26, 2026 issue.
• Russia: Letters from the Opposition. The New York Review of Books, March 13, 2025 issue.
• “The Kazakh Domestic Violence Murder Trial that Captivated Russia.” Foreign Policy, May 14, 2024.
• “Moscow’s Story.” Review of Jade McGlynn, Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia and Russia’s War. New Left Review no. 146 (March/April 2024).
• “There Is Something Putin Cannot Control” [on Russia’s pro-war “Z-culture” and resistance]. The New York Times, March 13, 2024.
• “From Ravensbrück to Papal Advisor, The Life of Wanda Półtawska.” Aeon, June 6, 2023.
• “What Will Russia Without Putin Look Like? Maybe This.” The New York Times, November 21, 2022.
• “The Soviet Union Never Really Solved Russian Nationalism.” Aeon, July 5, 2022.
• “Miłosz’s Magic Mountain.” The Baffler, May 2, 2022.
• “The Little Picketers of Russia.” The Nation, April 8, 2022.
• “The View from Warsaw” [on Polish-Ukrainian relations]. The Baffler, March 22, 2022.
• “They Are Stuck in Freezing Woods, and ‘Fortress Europe’ Won’t Let Them In.” The New York Times, October 6, 2021.
• “How Afghanistan Changed the Soviet Superpower.” The Atlantic, August 28, 2021.
• “Burying Homo Sovieticus.” Review of Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity. New Left Review no. 129 (May-June 2021).
• “The Unruly Masses: Andrei Konchalovsky’s Cautionary Tale.” The Los Angeles Review of Books, April 19, 2021.
• “The Political History of Concealing Illness, from Brezhnev to Trump.” The Washington Post, October 9, 2020.