Dr. Natalia Pervukhina-Kamyshnikova graduated from Moscow State University with an M.A. in English Literature. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Russian from Bryn Mawr College. Her dissertation grew into a book, Anton Chekhov: the Sense and the Nonsense (Legas, 1993). She has published articles on Chekhov, Pushkin, Solzhenitsyn, S. Zayaitsky, and M.Bulgakov in which she explored the connection between the author's narrative strategy and his world-view.

Her research on V.S. Pecherin (1807-1885), a Romantic poet, the first Russian political emigrant, a convert to Catholicism, and a contrarian who fascinated the imagination of Alexander Herzen and Fedor Dostoevsky, led her to the study of the Russian intellectual history of the nineteenth century. Her articles on Pecherin and his place in Russian culture of the XIX and XX cc. have been published in the USA and Israel. Her monograph, V.S. Pecherin – emigrant na vse vremena (V.S. Pecherin – Emigrant for All Times) has been published in Moscow in 2006. Professor Pervukhina's interests range from the history of Russian utopian projects to the analysis of contemporary Russian media.

She has taught at Bryn Mawr College (1980-1986), Middlebury summer school (1982-2000), and at the University of Illinois, Urbana (1987-1994). She has been teaching at the University of Tennessee since 1994.

She teaches language courses at all levels, courses in Russian literature of the XIXth and XXth centuries, history of Russian culture and Soviet and Russian film.