I am a writer specializing in Soviet and post-Soviet, socialist and post-socialist culture, history, and politics. I am Professor of Practice in the Comparative Literature Department at Cornell University.

My forthcoming book, THE OAK AND THE LARCH: A FOREST HISTORY OF RUSSIA AND ITS EMPIRES (Norton/William Collins/Oorschot, 2026), is a cultural history of the Russian forest. It was supported by a 2022-23 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Public Scholars grant.

My NEH-supported Economist 1843 story “Lost in a Dark Wood,” on migrants in the forest on the Belarusian-Polish border, was awarded a 2023 British Journalism Award. According to the judges, it was “brilliant investigative journalism with a kick in the solar plexus. It took headlines, soundbites and government propaganda around immigration and turned into a deeply human story that gets to the heart of the issue.” The article was also shortlisted for a True Story Award.

My first book, BLACK SQUARE: ADVENTURES IN POST-SOVIET UKRAINE (Norton/Heinemann, 2016), traces the emergence of an independent Ukraine and the beginnings of the conflict that has now become Russia’s full-scale invasion. According to William Vollman, “Pinkham is the one to read.” You can read excerpts about Crimean Crusoes in n+1, the early days of Ukraine's Maidan revolution on Lithub, and post-revolutionary Maidan in Dissent. 

My articles, essays, and book reviews have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times,The Guardian,The New Left Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Nation, n+1, 1843 Magazine, Foreign Affairs, The Times Literary Supplement, Foreign Policy, Archaeology, and The Paris Review, among other places. Topics have included Russia’s most elusive novelist; a mysterious Siberian asteroid; refugees trapped in Europe’s oldest forest; revolutionaries, oligarchs, and graphomaniacs; Tolstoy's wife's revenge; and dancing bears. 

I hold a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Columbia University. My academic research has focused on writer cults, national identity, and the poetics of censorship in the late Soviet Union and contemporary Russia.

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Recent pieces and older favorites:

“By the left march!” on two new books about Socialist Realist art and the body (Times Literary Supplement)

“The Fraught U.S.-Soviet Search for Alien Life,” on Rebecca Charbonneau’s history Mixed Signals (The New Yorker)

“The Mysterious Novelist Who Foresaw Putin’s Russia,” on Victor Pelevin (Guardian—The Long Read)

“A Giant Crater in Siberia is Belching Up Russia’s Past,” on the secrets revealed by melting permafrost (New York Times)

A border dispatch (The Drift)

In conversation with Merve Emre as part of her series “The Critic and Her Publics”

“Invasion, Day by Day,” on Yevgenia Belorusets’s War Diary (NYRB)

“Fireball over Siberia,” on the mysterious Tunguska Event (NYRB)

“Lost in a Dark Wood”: Reported feature on migrants crossing through the forest on the Belarusian-Polish border (The Economist’s 1843 Magazine)

“The Freedom of Historical Fiction,” on the Russian Formalist Yuri Tynianov (NYRB)

“Yesterday Never Existed,” on Osip Mandelstam (Poetry Foundation)

“Ghosts of Borodino,” on Maria Stepanova (Harper’s)

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Balka: Women, Drugs, and HIV in Ukraine, a short documentary I made with Anya Meksin and Leeza Meksin, is available on YouTube, where it has been viewed more than 4 million times. "The Last Jew in Stalindorf," in BLACK SQUARE, tells the story of our trip to Ukraine to film Balka, and our trip to Anya and Leeza's grandmother's former village in eastern Ukraine.