Svetlana Boym

Svetlana Boym (Russian: Светла́на Ю́рьевна Бо́йм) is the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Harvard University, and a media artist, playwright and novelist.^[1] She is also an associate of the Graduate School of Design and Architecture at Harvard University. Much of her current work is focused on developing the new theoretical concept of the off-modern.

Boym was born in Leningrad, USSR. She studied Spanish at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad.^[2] She received an M.A. from Boston University and a Ph.D. from Harvard.

Boym's written work explores relationships between utopia and kitsch, between memory and modernity, and between homesickness and sickness of home.^[3] Her research interests generally include 20th-century Russian literature, cultural studies, comparative literature and literary studies. In addition to teaching and writing, Boym also sits on the Editorial Collective of the interdisciplinary scholarly journal Public Culture. Boym has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Cabot Award for Research in Humanities, and an award from the American Council of Learned Societies. She also won a Gilette Company Fellowship which provided her half a year study at the American Academy in Berlin.^[4]

In the 2006, Boym's media art exhibit opened in Ljubljana Factory Rog Art Space during the City of Women Festival. At the same time she curated the exhibit "Territories of Terror: Memories and Mythologies of Gulag in Contemporary Russian-American Art" at the Boston University Art Gallery.^[5]

Selected bibliography

• Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea (University of Chicago Press, 2010) ISBN 978-0-226-06973-9
• Ninotchka: A Novel (SUNY Press, 2003)
• Kosmos: Remembrances of the Future - photographs by Adam Bartos, text by Svetlana Boym (Princeton Architectural Press, 2001)
• The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2001)
• Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Harvard University Press, 1994)
• Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (Harvard University Press, 1991)

Notes and references

External links

• Boym's personal website displaying her art
• Boym's page at the Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University
• Boym's page at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University
• 'Ilya Kabakov: The Soviet Toilet and the Palace of Utopias' an article by Boym for ARTMARGINS 1999
• Article about Boym's exhibition, Nostalgic Technologies by Ken Gewertz for Harvard University Gazette, March 2007.
• Nostalgic Technology: Notes for an Off-modern Manifesto by Svetlana Boym