Roberta Reeder has devoted much of her life to the study or Russian culture. She has published The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova and Russian Folk Lyrics and has written over forty articles on Russian culture. She also adapted Akhmatova's narrative poem, Poem without a Hero, as a dance-drama with music by Alexander and Ivan Tcherepnin at the Theater Institute in Giessen, Germany. She has taught at major institutions such as Harvard and Yale as well as at the university in Marbug, Germany and the former Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany.