She has translated some of Bakhtin's most influential works, including Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M.
[1] At graduate school Emerson encountered the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, who at that time was largely unknown in both his native (Soviet) Russia and the West.
The book is now considered a classic in Dostoevsky studies and literary theory, and has been influential in other disciplines such as philosophy and psychology.
[3] She has written extensively on other significant Russian cultural figures, notably Boris Godunov, Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Pushkin and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.
She has won lifetime awards for “outstanding contributions to the field” from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (language and literature), and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (area studies), as well as awards for her individual books.