Author Biography
Mikhail Lurie was born in 1969 in Leningrad into a family of engineers. Since the end of the 1980s, being a student of the philology department (Herzen University), he began to participate in folklore expeditions and became interested in folklore and ethnography. In 1999, in the Russian Institute of Art History he defended his PhD thesis The Yuletide Mummer’s Plays: the Essay of Morphological Description. From 2001 to 2011 he worked at the Department of Children’s Literature of the St. Petersburg University of Culture and Arts, from 2009 to the present – at the Department of Anthropology of the European University at St. Petersburg. He has been doing field studies in the rural areas in the North-West region of Russia, in the Zakarpattia Oblast of Ukraine, in Siberia and the Far North, as well as in more than 30 Russian and Ukrainian cities and towns. Among his academic interests are Russian peasant folklore and rituals, modern children’s folklore, youth and army subcultures, urban graffiti, amateur (‘naïv’’) literature, cities’ ‘local texts’ and construction of local knowledge and identities. In recent years, he has been studying urban songs of the 20th century, the history of Russian folkloristics, the phenomena of the ‘new rurality’, the ethnography of cultural life, and also engaged in applied urban anthropological researches. He is the author of more than 150 works on anthropology and folklore, and the editor of several collections of articles and academic publications of folklore materials.