Jenny Kaminer has been named director of the Davis Humanities Institute (DHI). Over the past two years, Kaminer has chaired the DHI Visioning Committee, leading a collaborative effort to reimagine and revitalize the institute.
"I am confident in Professor Kaminer’s leadership to advance these goals and to strengthen DHI as a campus hub for connection and ideas across the arts, humanities and beyond," said Estella Atekwana, dean of the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis.
The renewed vision preserves DHI’s legacy as a welcoming home for faculty, staff, and students in the arts and humanities, fostering informal networking and celebrating one another’s work, while expanding the institute’s impact on campus and in the community. Key priorities include creating more undergraduate research opportunities and supporting cross-disciplinary collaborations within the College of Letters and Science and across other UC Davis colleges.
Kaminer is a Professor of Russian and has an affiliated faculty position in the Department of Comparative Literature. Kaminer has been with UC Davis since 2009. Most recently, she was awarded the 2025 College of Letters and Science Teaching Award. In addition to her work with the DHI, Kaminer previously served as chair of the Department of German and Russian and Dean’s Office Faculty Advisor for the Arts and Humanities in the College of Letters and Science.
Kaminer comes to this position with a body of research that reflects the kind of interdisciplinary and innovative work taking place in the humanities and arts at UC Davis, and for which the College of Letters and Science is known. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of Russian culture whose publications have encompassed a broad range of historical epochs — from the nineteenth century to the present day — as well as genres and media, including drama, prose, film and television.
Kaminer’s first book, Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture (Northwestern, 2014), received the Heldt Prize for Best Book in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Gender Studies.
Her most recent book, Haunted Dreams: Fantasies of Adolescence in Post-Soviet Culture (Cornell, 2022), is the first comprehensive study in English devoted to cultural representations of adolescence in Russia since the end of the Soviet Union, and also the first in-depth study to situate these post-Soviet cultural representations within the broader context of European and Anglo-American scholarship on adolescence and youth. It won the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL) 2023 Book Award.
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