E-mail: j.neumeyer@instytutpileckiego.pl 

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8222-0896 
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Joy-Neumeyer 

Biographical note

Joy Neumeyer is a historian of Russia and Eastern Europe. In 2020 at the University of California, Berkeley, she defended her doctoral dissertation in history on the obsession with death and despair in late Soviet culture. She was a Fulbright Scholar 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 writings have appeared in “The New York Times”, “The New York Review of Books”, and the “American Historical Review”, among others. Joy Neumeyer’s first book, “A Survivor’s Education: Women, Violence, and the Stories We Don’t Tell” (PublicAffairs, 2024), examines the historical contexts of how violence against women is perceived. Her current research project focuses on the life of the founder of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, and the fate of the circle of Polish Communists that formed around him in the USSR.

Research/academic interests

• history of Russia and Eastern Europe;
• legacy of totalitarian violence;
• cultural history;
• gender history.

Awards and honors

• “A Survivor’s Education” was listed among Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2024;
• Friends of Cal History Dissertation Prize for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of history at UC Berkeley;
• Graduate Essay Prize from the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at UC Berkeley;
• Graduate Essay Prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.

Selected publications

Academic papers

• Neumeyer J. “Darkness at Noon: On History, Narrative, and Domestic Violence”. The American Historical Review 126, issue 2 (June 2021), 700–707.
• Neumeyer J. “Late Socialism as a Time of Weeping: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Vladimir Vysotskii”. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 22, issue 3 (2021), 511–533.
• Neumeyer J. “Patriarchal Primitivism: Dying Peasant Women and the Soviet Anti-Developmental Turn”. Widok: Teorie i praktyki kultury wizualnej, issue 30 (2021).

Monographs

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

Essays

• Neumeyer J. “Poland: Halfway to Democracy”. The New York Review of Books, 26 February 2026.
• Neumeyer J. “Russia: Letters from the Opposition”. The New York Review of Books, 13 March 2025.
• Neumeyer J. “The Kazakh Domestic Violence Murder Trial that Captivated Russia”. Foreign Policy, 14 May 2024.
• Neumeyer J. “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, issue 146 (March/April 2024).
• Neumeyer J. “There Is Something Putin Cannot Control” [an article about the Russian pro-war “Z culture” and the resistance movement]. The New York Times, 13 March 2024.
• Neumeyer J. “From Ravensbrück to Papal Advisor, The Life of Wanda Półtawska”. Aeon, 6 June 2023.
• Neumeyer J. “What Will Russia Without Putin Look Like? Maybe This”. The New York Times, 21 November 2022.
• Neumeyer J. “The Soviet Union Never Really Solved Russian Nationalism”. Aeon, 5 July 2022.
• Neumeyer J. “Miłosz’s Magic Mountain”. The Baffler, 2 May 2022.
• Neumeyer J. “The Little Picketers of Russia”. The Nation, 8 April 2022.
• Neumeyer J. “The View from Warsaw” [about Polish-Ukrainian relations]. The Baffler, 22 March 2022.
• Neumeyer J. “Russia by Numbers”. Review of Timothy Frye, Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia. New Left Review, issue 133 (January-April 2022).
• Neumeyer J. “Poland’s Abortion Ban Protests Changed the Country Forever”. Foreign Policy, 8 November 2021.
• Neumeyer J. “They Are Stuck in Freezing Woods, and ‘Fortress Europe’ Won’t Let Them In”. The New York Times, 6 October 2021.
• Neumeyer J. “In the Woods: Fortifying the EU’s Eastern Border”. New Left Review, 21 September 2021.
• Neumeyer J. “How Afghanistan Changed the Soviet Superpower”. The Atlantic, 28 August 2021.
• Neumeyer J. “Burying Homo Sovieticus”. Review of Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity, New Left Review, issue 129 (May-June 2021).
• Neumeyer J. “The Unruly Masses: Andrei Konchalovsky’s Cautionary Tale”. The Los Angeles Review of Books, 19 April 2021.
• Neumeyer J. “The Political History of Concealing Illness, from Brezhnev to Trump”. The Washington Post, 9 October 2020.

Chapters in monographs

• Neumeyer J. “Leonid Brezhnev and the Elixir of Life: Radical Longevity in Late Soviet Culture”, in: Energy Culture: Work, Power, and Waste in Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Jillian Porter and Maya Vinokour (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2023).

Participation in academic and organizational activities

Membership in academic societies and organizations

• Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies;
• American Historical Association.

Scholarships

• Fulbright Scholarship (Russia);
• Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute;
• Kennan Institute Short-Term Fellow, Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC;
• Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund Dissertation Fellowship, UC Berkeley and Stanford;
• Visiting Scholar at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, New York University;
• American Councils Academic Fellowship for research in Russia;
• Stephen F. Cohen-Robert C. Tucker Dissertation Research Fellowship, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies;
• Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study.