Natalya is a current PhD student at the department of Scandinavian with a Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. She obtained a B.A. in English and Scandinavian Studies at BYU in 2021, and received her M.A. from UC Berkeley in 2023. Her research interests include the relationship between Nordic literature and its political contexts, especially as it relates to the political landscape of women (including trans women) and gender queer individuals.

She is also interested in narratives of white nationalism and how these narratives show up in literature with gender themes. This includes an interest in why and how certain authors become canonized and continuously re-read in the Nordic region, especially authors that take up gender and feminist topics. Natalya has been awarded a fellowship at the Berkeley Language Center for her work on race and language pedagogy in the Nordic language classrooms in 2022. She also was awarded the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship and the Fritz O. Fernström Fellowship in 2023 for travel to Uppsala, Sweden for her work with the Swedish language. She has taught both beginner and intermediate Swedish for the Department of Scandinavian at UC Berkeley. She has been taking courses in French from the Berkeley French department and hopes to learn more about Francophone literature throughout her time here. Besides studying, Natalya loves running, writing, swimming, cooking, volunteering, hanging out with friends and family, and listening to audiobooks and podcasts in her free time.