Professor Boym is the author of four academic books, The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2001), Kosmos: Remembrances of the Future (with Adam Bartos, Princeton Architectural Press, 2001), Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (Harvard University Press, 1991) and Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Harvard University Press, 1994), of the novel Ninochka. She wrote numerous articles on creativity and exile, on poetry and politics, on poetic self-fashioning, on theories of authorship and theorists' diaries (Barthes and Benjamin), on contemporary culture, film, and visual art, on utopia and kitsch, memory and modernity, homesickness and sickness of home.

She teaches courses on the relationship between literature and visual arts, literature and architecture (Literature and Film and Text, Image, Culture) and literature and philosophy (Memory and Modernity, Modernity and Freedom). She also teaches courses in the Slavic Department on Russian Literature and Culture from early twentieth to the early twenty first century and in the Visual and Environmental Studies the course on Imagining City: Literature, Film and Visual Arts. Prof. Boym is a member of the PhD Program on History and Theory of Architecture at the Graduate School of Design.

Her primary languages of research are Russian, French, and Spanish (and occasionally Italian). Her work goes across various literary genres, including poetry, essay, short fiction, autobiography, drama, different media-painting, film, and photography. Her new book project is "The Other Freedom: Between Aesthetics and Politics" which explores cross-cultural approaches to the concept. She is also working on a multi-media project "Nostalgic Technologies." For Boym's media projects see www.svetlanaboym.com.