Liena Gurevich

Liena Gurevich was born in Moscow, USSR and left Russia as a teen in the late 1970’s. After recovering from the culture shock and too-long a stint in the business world, she ended up studying sociology at SUNY Purchase, which she feels was the birth of her “true” self. After graduating Purchase with honors, she was offered a graduate fellowship and assistantship at NYU where her interests in stratification and injustice took shape and developed further leading her on the path to her research on the intersection of race, class and gender in the criminal justice system and specifically, in the courts. Dr. Gurevich published several peer reviewed articles in which she examined courtroom discourses and usages of various statuses of the individual as resources for the construction of either condemning or compelling narratives.
In 2004, upon receipt of her doctorate in Sociology with concentration in Criminology, Liena started her career at Hofstra, where she continues to work in the dual roles of the Associate Professor and Criminology Program Director. In 2011, Dr. Gurevich founded a Criminology BA program at Hofstra’s Sociology Department, which since then had grown into 200 majors-strong and is considered to be one of the best criminology programs in the local area. The distinct feature of the program, under Dr. Gurevich’s curation, is its critical orientation, geared towards identification of sources of social problems and injustices, their rigorous analysis, and systematic amelioration of human suffering. Her affiliation with Herstory has been most fruitfully contributing towards these goals.