Getting a bit longer...
Cameron most recently worked as a Content Producer and Digital Editor with NBC Bay Area (KNTV). He is also one-half of the Slavic Literature Pod duo – a podcast that contextualizes, summarizes, and analyzes Russian and other Slavic literature (while also enjoying a few craft beers along the way). You can find them anywhere you get your podcasts. For those inclined toward video, they’re also intermittently on Youtube.
Though working in a variety of different fields, Cameron has developed a wide skillset and prides himself on his adaptability. From 2021 to 2022, he did a year of service in Stockton with AmeriCorps. Before that, he worked as an HR assistant at a retirement community and a Patient Care Coordinator with a psychiatric clinic. He has also worked as a Research Assistant, an Office Clerk, and a Peer Advisor.
He is an alum of the University of California, Davis, where he received his B.A. in International Relations with a focus on Conflict Theory and Eastern European studies. While in undergrad, he studied abroad at the University of Granada in Spain and at Saint Petersburg State University in Russia. Both experiences pushed Cameron’s language abilities and improved his cross-cultural competencies on a daily basis. A writer at the UC Davis Global Learning Hub very kindly wrote an article about his experiences in Russia.
Cameron combined his passions for journalism and international politics at Davis, spending slightly over two years working with the student-run radio team The Cycle News Hour on 90.3 KDVS. While there, Cameron managed a team of student reporters and served as an intermittent co-host for the weekly news show. He was one-half of the duo that created and hosted a Saturday show where representatives from Davis clubs came on for interviews and to play trivia games.
Outside of work and projects, Cameron is also longtime horror fan (ask him about the movie spreadsheet) and is currently working his way through the Resident Evil video games. He spends too much time in the kitchen and is in the bad habit of washing dishes the next day.
Cameron reads a great deal of Russian literature, trashy sci-fi, and history books about the early Soviet Union. His appetite for acquiring books far exceeds how many he can realistically read, but it doesn’t stop him.
The Slavic Literature Pod has spent over half of 2024 doing a chapter-by-chapter read along of the novel Life and Fate, written in the late ’50s to early ’60s by the Soviet journalist and author Vasily Grossman.
Among all the books Cameron has covered for the podcast, Life and Fate is far and away one of the most radically incisive and morally provocative. Grossman’s novel is a sweeping epic of the second world war, telling the tale of the Shaposhnikov sisters, their families, and assorted friends and relations.
The novel finds its characters on the front lines in Stalingrad, in prisoner-of-war camps, in capital-in-exile Kazan, in capital-in-fact Moscow, and even in the death camps. These scenes are especially harrowing from Grossman, who not only spent much of the war as a frontline reporter but also wrote some of the first public accounts of Nazi death camps. This last point had an especially personal bent: Grossman’s mother — who was Jewish — was among those murdered en masse by Nazi forces in Ukraine.
Novelist William T. Vollman once referred to the novel as “one of the greatest books of the twentieth century,” describing it as “a sequel and an antidote to such dystopic novels as 1984 and Darkness at Noon, which portray the horror of these situations without sufficiently cherishing the impotent yet all-important acts of the doomed.”
Tackling one chapter per day, The Slavic Literature Pod has been releasing daily podcasts and articles on the novel. For those who don’t have the time to read a chapter each day, they have also been releasing periodic round-up episodes in their main feed. Their written work has been an intense undertaking and should soon be available as a standalone PDF.
For a little taste of their round-up episodes, check out Episode 1 here.
The podcast has also previously covered Life and Fate‘s predecessor novel Stalingrad. Cameron has spent an inordinate amount of time with Grossman’s other work, his biographies, and his reporting. You are welcome to ask him about the topic — as long as you are forgiving of a little long-windedness.
