Her primary area of research is the family in the nineteenth-century novel, with a focus on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. She is interested in literary depictions of siblinghood, kinship, and forms of love that provide an alternative to the standard romantic love/marriage plot. Her book, Siblings in Tolstoy: The Path to Universal Brotherhood, will be published this fall by Northwestern University Press. Recently, she has begun to research the links between nineteenth-century conceptions of the family and the scientific theories of Charles Darwin and Ilya Mechnikov. Berman also studies Russian opera, with a particular interest in adaptations of literary texts.