Faculty Spotlight—Tanya Bakhmetyeva

Tanya standing on a rock formation while smiling at the camera.

Tanya Bakhmetyeva has been an instrumental faculty member in SWAG (Sexuality, Women, and Gender Studies) at the University of Rochester. After pioneering many programs and initiatives for the Susan B. Anthony Institute as its Associate Academic Director, Professor Bakhmetyeva is currently the interim director of the Humanities Center. She is a Modern European historian, an internationally recognized scholar, and the author of Mother of the Church: Sofia Svechina, the Salon, and the Politics of Catholicism in Nineteenth Century Russia and France (Northern Illinois University Press, 2016; winner of 2018 Harry Koenig Book Award, American Catholic Historical Association.

In her current research, she focuses on such issues as ecofeminism, masculinity, gender and environment, and gender and science. Her articles appeared in such prestigious journals as Feminist Formations, Oral History Review, and Diplomatica.She is currently completing a new book, The Politburo Goes hunting: Masculinity, Nature, and Power Among the Soviet Political Elite (under contract, Cornell University Press, 2026) and is a lead editor on an edited volume, The Fedchenko: an Eco-Biography of a Glacier (under contract, White Horse Press, UK, 2026).

Her recent awards included grants from NEH, the Alfred Sloan Foundation, and Swiss National Science Foundation, and a summer fellowship at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Eruope, in Leipzig, Germany. She is also a recipient of an award from the American Environmental History Association as well as internal Pump Primer grant and the University of Rochester Research Award. Her work on the world’s glacial regions was recently featured in the University Newscenter.