Joy Neumeyer is a cultural historian who specializes in Russia and Eastern Europe. Her research examines the relationship between culture and sociopolitical transformation. She is particularly interested in death, gender, the body, and narratives of decay and regeneration.
As a Max Weber Fellow, Joy is revising her dissertation, ‘Dying Empire: Visions of the End in Late Socialism,’ for publication as a book. Combining biomedical discourse with science fiction, film, painting, literature, and pop music, this project reveals the proliferation of death in the late Soviet cultural imagination and explores its relationship to the demise of the Soviet state. She will also begin work on her next project, a cultural history of Russian feminism in the twentieth century. Her research has been supported by sources including American Councils for Higher Education; the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; and the Fulbright Program.
Joy received her Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. She also holds an M.A. in History from UC Berkeley and a B.A. with honors in History and Slavic Studies from Brown University. Her broader research interests include the transnational art of socialism and the global history of the 1970s. Her writing about society and culture in contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe has appeared in publications including the Guardian, Vice, ARTNews, and the Calvert Journal.
Expertise for Teaching and Mentoring of Ph.D. Researchers
Joy has experience teaching Soviet history, the history of science, and American history.