Vera Shevzov

Vera Shevzov, professor of religion, and member of the Program of Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Smith College, is a scholar of modern and post-Soviet Orthodox Christianity in Russia. A graduate of Yale College (’82), she subsequently also completed her Ph.D. in history at Yale, under the mentorship of Paul Bushkovitch and the late Jaroslav Pelikan. She has also been an ISM Colloquium speaker. Her Yale ISM project—“How Do We Sing of Thee?”: Post-Gulag Orthodox Liturgy in Contemporary Russia—examines post-Gulag Orthodox liturgical narratives and recent post-Soviet liturgical production to gain insight into the impact of cultural trauma on contemporary Russian Orthodox ecclesial identity, values, and sacred sensibilities related to such notions as history and memory, witnessing, sacrifice, and victimhood.