Maya Garcia received her B.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014. Her undergraduate honors thesis explored the literary lineage of Mayakovsky’s lyric hero in his last great pre-Revolutionary poem, Man. She has studied abroad in Russia with CIEE and CLS, in St. Petersburg and Kazan, respectively.

After graduation, she was briefly hired by a music software company as a Russian and Eastern European popular music specialized contractor. Relieved to escape the tech industry after the contract’s end, she intends to continue working with popular music in an academic manner. Maya is deeply interested in Russian and Eastern European popular culture of the past and present, from nineteenth-century erotica to late-Soviet rock operas to present-day Russian bloggers.