Professor Fainberg is a sociologist and historian specializing in both Soviet Studies and Eastern European Jewish history, with a particular focus on how State politics shapes ethnic identities. Her dissertation to be published in 2012 (Paris, Fayard) traces how Soviet Jews reconstructed their ethnic personae, social networks and conceptions of Jewish heritage under the Soviet nationalities policy in the post-war period. She brings to her work a special interest in the shaping of collective identities, the mechanisms of social discrimination and the dynamics of collective memory. Her latest project moves her into the post-Soviet space, and explores the promotion of new national narratives and remembrance patterns among ethnic minority groups in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus since the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Professor Fainberg received her academic training in Paris, first at Ecole Normale Superieure in Philosophy and later at Sciences Po in Political Science, where she received her Ph.D. in 2008. She has taught Political Sociology and History at the State University of St. Petersburg, Russia (2002– 2003) and at Columbia University (2005–2007) where she was a Visiting Scholar at the Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies.

At Georgetown Professor Fainberg teaches the course “Gateway to Jewish Civilization,” an
introduction to Jewish history and culture from antiquity to the present. Her other courses
include both lecture courses and advanced seminars on Eastern European Jewish history, the French Nation-State and its minorities, and political dissent in the former Soviet Union.