© SARAH CRAMER SHIELDS
An innovative, award-winning teacher of Russian language, literature, and culture, Dr. Andrew D. Kaufman holds a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures from Stanford University and has spent the last twenty years bringing alive the Russian classics to Americans young and old. Dr. Kaufman, whose previous titles include Understanding Tolstoy and Russian for Dummies (coauthor), is a featured Tolstoy expert on Oprah.com, and he is frequently invited to discuss Russian literature and culture on national and international television and radio programs. An internationally recognized Tolstoy scholar, Dr. Kaufman has lectured at the National Endowment for the Arts, the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and at the Leo Tolstoy Museum and Estate at Yasnaya Polyana. Currently he is a Lecturer and Faculty Fellow at the University of Virginia, where he founded and teaches a community-based literature course, “Books Behind Bars: Life, Literature, and Leadership,” in which students lead discussions about Russian literature with incarcerated youth at juvenile correctional centers in Virginia. To learn more about Dr. Kaufman and his work, please visit his website: