Svetlana Boym

Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature

Barker Center 311 - 496-4617

Education: B.A. 1980 Leningrad State Pedagogical Institute, M.A. 1983 Boston University, Ph.D. 1988 Harvard.

Interests: Comparative literature, cultural theory and philosophy, 20th-century Russian literature (poetry, essay, autobiographical fiction), film and contemporary art, modernism and avant-garde, East European and Post-Soviet culture, study of memory and nostalgia, political and artistic freedom. Prof. Boym also teaches in the Comparative Literature department and Visual and Environmental Studies and is is a member of the PhD Program on History and Theory of Architecture at the Graduate School of Design.

Current Courses:

Fall:
• Visual and Environmental Studies 184 (Imagining the City: Literature, Film, and the Arts)
• Comparative Literature 273 (Approaches to Modernity: The Metropolis)

Spring:
• Slavic 98 (Junior Tutorial)
• Slavic 281 (Literature, Film, and Visual Arts in Russia, 1920-1930)

Selected Works: She is the author of The Future of Nostalgia (2001); Death in Quotation Marks (1991); Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (1994 ); Kosmos: Remebrances of the Future (2002) and the novel Ninochka (2003). Her essays include "From Russian Soul and Post-Communist Nostalgia" (1995); "Socialist Realism and Kitsch" (1995); Politics and Poetics of Estrangement : Victor Shklovsky and Hannah Arendt (2005); Dialogues on Freedom (Pushkin, Tocqueville, Berlin and Axmatova) (2005); Paradoxes of Freedom in Contemporary Russia (2005)

Work in Progress: Her new book project is "The Other Freedom: Between Aesthetics and Politics."

In the fall of 2006 Svetlana Boym is curating the exhibit "Territories of Terror: Mythologies and Memories of Gulag in Contemporary Russian-American Art" at BUAG in Boston.

She is also working on her own multi-media art project "Nostalgic Technologies." For Boym's media projects see www.svetlanaboym.com.