Major interests: Russian culture, film, women's studies, theater, and 19th century literature; also Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies.

Selected publications:

• Identity Theft: The Jew in Imperial Russia and the Case of Avraam Uri Kovner. Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences, ed. Daniel Boyarin, Chana Kronfeld, Naomi Seidman (Stanford University Press, 2003).
• Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels & the Poetics of Cultural Critique  (Stanford University Press,1992).
• Russia's Legal Fictions (University of Michigan Press, 1998). Series on "Law, Meaning, and Violence." Winner, MLA 1999 Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures.
• "Rosenfeld, Dostoevsky, and Jewish Shame" (article in progress).

New Research: Russia and the Jews, 1920-2000: Language, Race, and Nation. A study of literary works in Yiddish and Russian, focusing on the textual, linguistic, ideological, and racialized production of the Jew's difference in Soviet Russia.