Emma Friedlander

Emma Friedlander

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Emma Friedlander entered the History PhD program at Harvard University in 2020. Her dissertation is titled “The Soviet New Age: Alternative spirituality and the collapse of communism, 1975-2000.” This project examines the popular culture of alternative spirituality, alternative healing, and the paranormal that swept late Soviet and post-Soviet society. Emma approaches this history from below, centering the ordinary people most associated with the popular phenomenon, especially women and the lower-to-middle classes. The dissertation asks: what does the Soviet New Age tell us about the lived experience of Soviet collapse? How did ordinary people navigate society’s ideological, spiritual, and material crises? She suggests that people experimented with alternative spirituality to fill the spiritual and ideological vacuum left by the collapse of communism. Their attraction to the alternative reflected distrust towards official institutions and ideologies – and overall sense of alienation – that placed the Soviet case within the global processes of late twentieth century postmodernity. She studies this phenomenon as it emerged against the background of Eastern European spiritual tradition then subsumed to state atheism, in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Russia.

Emma is generally interested in the social, cultural, and gender history of the late and post-Soviet Union. She is also completing a secondary PhD in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Her research and training have been supported by the Association for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies, the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, Title VIII, and Harvard grants. 

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