Svetlana Boym (russian: Светла́на Ю́рьевна Бо́йм; 1959 – August 5, 2015) was a Russian-American cultural theorist, visual and media artist, playwright and novelist. She was the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

. She was an associate of the Graduate School of Design and Architecture at

. Much of her work focused on developing the new theoretical concept of the off-modern.

Biography

Boym was born in

Leningrad Saint Petersburg ( rus, links=no, Санкт-Петербург, a=Ru-Sankt Peterburg Leningrad Petrograd Piter.ogg, r=Sankt-Peterburg, p=ˈsankt pʲɪtʲɪrˈburk), formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991), i ...

USSR The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...

. She studied Spanish at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad. At the age of 19, she emigrated to Boston, after spending time at a refugee transit camp in

Simmering Simmering is a food preparation technique by which foods are cooked in hot liquids kept just below the boiling point of water (lower than ) and above poaching temperature (higher than ). To create a steady simmer, a liquid is brought to a boil, ...

, a district of

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

. Her father subsequently lost his position as an engineer, and her parents were denied the right to leave the USSR for six years. She received an M.A. from

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original campu ...

and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1988. Boym died on August 5, 2015, aged 56, in Boston, Massachusetts, from cancer. She was survived by her partner, the political theorist Dana Villa.

Writing

Boym's written work explored relationships between utopia and kitsch, memory and modernity, and homesickness and the sickness of home. Her research interests included 20th-century Russian literature, cultural studies, comparative literature and literary studies. In addition to teaching and writing, Boym also sat on the Editorial Collective of the interdisciplinary scholarly journal

Public Culture ''Public Culture'' is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary academic journal of cultural studies, published three times a year—in January, May, and September—by Duke University Press. It is sponsored by the Department of Media, Culture, and Commu ...

. Boym was awarded a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

, the Cabot Award for Research in Humanities, and an award from the

American Council of Learned Societies American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

. She won a Gilette Company Fellowship which provided her half a year study at the

American Academy in Berlin The American Academy in Berlin is a private, independent, nonpartisan research and cultural institution in Berlin dedicated to sustaining and enhancing the long-term intellectual, cultural, and political ties between the United States and Germany ...

Artistic practice

In 2006, an exhibition showing Boym's media art opened in Factory Rog-Metelkovo, an art space in

Ljubljana Ljubljana (also known by other historical names) is the capital and largest city of Slovenia. It is the country's cultural, educational, economic, political and administrative center. During antiquity, a Roman city called Emona stood in the ar ...

during the City of Women Festival. After that, she exhibited her work in various spaces including the

Center for Book Arts Center for Book Arts (CBA) is a non-profit arts organization, founded in 1974. It is the first organization of its kind in the United States dedicated to contemporary interpretations of the book as an art object while preserving traditional pract ...

in New York in 2008, and Galerija 101 in Kaunas in 2009. She also curated the exhibit "Territories of Terror: Memories and Mythologies of Gulag in Contemporary Russian-American Art" at Boston's University Art Gallery in 2006. The exhibition featured works by

Vitaly Komar Komar and Melamid (pronunciation: ''Kómar and Melamíd'') is a tandem team of Russian-born American conceptualist artists Vitaly Komar (born 1943) and Alexander Melamid (born 1945). In an artists' statement they said that "even if only one of us ...

Alexander Melamid Alexander Melamid (russian: Алекса́ндр Дани́лович Мелами́д) (born July 14, 1945) is a Russian-born Conceptualist and performance artist. Melamid was born into a Jewish family of , a Soviet historian living in Moscow. ...

, Leonid Sokov,

Grisha Bruskin Grisha Bruskin (born October 21, 1945) is a Russian artist known as a painter, sculptor, and printmaker. He was born in Moscow. Between 1963 and 1968, he studied at the Moscow Textile Institute (Art Department). In 1969, he became a member of ...

, Eugene Yelchin,

Irina Nakhova Irina Isayevna Nakhova (russian: Ирина Исаевна Нахова; born 1955 in Moscow) is a Russian artist. Her father, Isai Nakhov, is a philologist. At 14 years old her mother took her to Victor Pivovarov's Atelier. Pivovarov played an ...

and Vadim Zakharov. The exhibition tackled the dual imperative of Gulag history and mythology, map and territory. Boym also edited the exhibition catalogue that accompanied the exhibition. In 2016, Boym's short film ''Remembering Forgetting'' about her emigration debuted posthumously in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

Selected bibliography

Books

* ''Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea'' (University of Chicago Press, 2010) * ''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)

Articles

* The Off-Modern Mirror, ''E-flux'', no. 19, October 201

* Scenography of Friendship, ''Cabinet Magazine'', Issue 36: Friendship, Winter 2009/1

* Poetics and Politics of Estrangement: Victor Shklovsky and Hannah Arendt, ''Poetics Today,'' Vol. 26, no. 4, 2005, pp. 581–61

* Nostalgia and Its Discontents, ''The Hedgehog Review'', Summer 200

* Conspiracy Theories and Literary Ethics: Umberto Eco, Danilo Kiš and the Protocols of Zion, ''Comparative Literature'', Vol. 51, no. 2, Spring 1999, pp. 97–12

* On Diasporic Intimacy: Ilya Kabakov's Installations and Immigrant Homes, ''Critical Inquiry,'' Vol. 24, no. 2, Winter 1998, pp. 498–52

* Estrangement as a Lifestyle: Shklovsky and Brodsky, ''Poetics Today,'' Vol. 17, No. 14, Winter 1996, pp. 511–53

* From the Russian Soul to Post-Communist Nostalgia, ''Representations,'' Vol. 49, Winter 1995, pp. 133–16

* The archeology of Banality: The Soviet Home, ''Public Culture,'' Vol. 6, no. 2, 1994, pp. 263–29

Notes and references

External links

Boym's page at the Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University

* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20080421050846/http://www.artmargins.com/content/feature/boym2.html '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 {{DEFAULTSORT:Boym, Svetlana 1959 births 2015 deaths Deaths from cancer in Massachusetts American literary critics Women literary critics Boston University alumni Harvard University alumni Harvard University faculty Writers from Saint Petersburg 20th-century American novelists Novelists from Massachusetts 20th-century American non-fiction writers American women critics