C.V. I Publications I Audio/Video
Research Interest
economic anthropology, socialism, property, animals in society, liberalism, intellectual history, anthropological theory
Profile
Xenia Cherkaev is interested in how questionably legal but ethically righteous action enlivens formalized legal systems, and in how domestic and synanthropic animals become the objects and subjects of law. Geographically, she mostly writes about Russia. She is the author of Gleaning for Communism: the Soviet Socialist Household Economy in Theory and Practice (Cornell University Press 2023). Her articles and essays have been published in The American Historical Review, Anthropology and Humanism, Cahiers du monde russe, Environmental Humanities, Ab Imperio, Slavic Review, Sotsiologiia Vlasti, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, by the University of Toronto Press, the Borey Art Center in St. Petersburg and in the online sections of Cultural Anthropology and American Anthropologist. Before joining the Max Planck Institute, she taught at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, MA. Before that, she was a fellow at Harvard's Academy for International and Area Studies. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. Her work has received funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and recognition from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology.