Svetlana Boym was a prolific writer, a charismatic professor, a novelist, and a public intellectual. She was also a fiercely resourceful and reflective immigrant; her most resonant book, The Future of Nostalgia, was deeply rooted in that experience. Even after The Future of Nostalgia carried her fame beyond academic circles, few readers were aware of all of her creative personas. She was simply too prolific, and her work migrated across most people's disciplinary boundaries-from literary and cultural studies through film, visual, and material culture studies, performance, intermedia, and new media.
The Svetlana Boym Reader presents a comprehensive view of Boym's singularly creative work in all its aspects. It includes Boym's classic essays, carefully chosen excerpts from her five books, and journalistic gems. Showcasing her roles both as curator and curated, the reader includes interviews and excerpts from exhibition catalogues as well as samples of intermedial works like Hydrant Immigrants. It also features autobiographical pieces that shed light on the genealogy of her scholarly work and rarities like an excerpt from Boym's first graduate school essay on Russian literature, complete with marginalia by her mentor Donald Fanger. Last but not least, the reader includes late pieces that Boym did not live to see through publication, as well as transcripts of her memorable last lectures and performances.
About the Authors
Svetlana Boym was a literary critic, visual artist, writer of fiction, and Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, USA. Her books include Death in Quotation Marks, Common Places, The Future of Nostalgia, Another Freedom and The Off-Modern. Her artworks were exhibited in New York, Berlin, Ljubljana, Glasgow, Copenhagen, Kaunas, and Cambridge. She lectured and performed in Freud's Museum in Vienna, in the New York Artists' Space, at the MoMA, Vienna Kunsthalle, The Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, La Maison de Sciences de l'Homme, Paris, and Moscow ICA.
Cristina Vatulescu is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at NYU, USA. Her first book, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film and The Secret Police (2010, 2013) won the 2011 Heldt Prize and was also named a 2011 Outstanding Academic Title Award by Choice.
Tamar Abramov is Senior Advisor to the President of the Mandel Foundation, Jerusalem, Israel. Previously she was Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey.
Julia Chadaga is Associate Professor of Russian Studies at Macalester College, USA. She is the author of Optical Play: Glass, Vision, and Spectacle in Russian Culture (2014), which was shortlisted for the Historia Nova Prize.
Jacob Emery is Assistant Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Indiana University, USA. He is the author of Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism (2017).
Julia Vaingurt is Associate Professor of Russian literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA. She has published widely on Russian modernism and avant-garde, including Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and Arts in Russia of the 1920s (2013).
Industry Reviews
An essential collection of essays in literary and cultural criticism by Russian-American writer Svetlana Boym ... [The editors] provide a bibliography of works published within Boym's nearly thirty-year career, and they have assembled a compelling collection that positions this contemporary philosopher as a 'foundational thinker.' * Forum for Modern Language Studies *
For people already familiar with Boym's work, or for those simply interested in the diverse subjects it tackles, this volume will be an excellent sourcebook. It showcases Boym's intellectual versatility, her eloquence, and her passion. At a time when migration is evoked everywhere but poorly understood in its cultural, intellectual, and historical implications, Boym's patient, and personal, examination of the phenomenon is invaluable. Her work develops an inspiring view of the university as a realm where creativity trumps neoliberal expediency. * Sven Spieker, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA *
Every emigrant tries to make 'families' wherever he/she goes. Svetlana Boym made hers among students, academics, artists, writers and thinkers, in different geographical sites, even in cyberspace, bumping into unknown interlocutors. The Svetlana Boym Reader is an impressive book put together in her honor by the members of her 'family'-her former students, literature scholars, and academic acquaintances. Cristina Vatulescu, Tamar Abramov, Nicole G. Burgoyne, Julia Chadaga, Jacob Emery, and Julia Vaingurt have compiled selections of Boym's work, grouped by her favorite themes, with each theme introduced by the editors. This book is a brilliant scholarly achievement, but it is also an intimate and emotional one. All the texts invite the reader to join a dialogue, as inspirational dialogue was what Svetlana Boym missed the most and enjoyed the most when she found it. * Dubravka Ugresic, author of Europe in Sepia (2014) *
Svetlana Boym's eloquent, ironic, deeply personal writings explore issues of major concern today: emigration and exile, art and politics, trauma and nostalgia. The Svetlana Boym Reader's rich suite of selections illuminates the deep continuities in her multifaceted work as it developed over time, redefining modernity-and off-modernity-for a global era. * David Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature, Harvard University, USA *
