Svetlana Boym (1966=2015) was a writer, scholar, teacher, and artist, and is fondly remembered by her colleagues in the Department of Comparative Literature.
She is the author of The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2001), Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea (2010), Architecture of the Off-Modern (2008), Kosmos: Remembrances of the Future (with photos by Adam Bartos, 2003), Territories of Terror: Memories of Gulag in Contemporary Art (Exhibit Catalogue, 2006), Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (1995), and the novel Ninochka (2003).
She lived parallel lives that sometimes cross. Before her passing in 2015, her most recent projects were: Off Modern (a non-fiction book manuscript) and Break a Leg! Letters not about Love (mostly fiction).
Boym’s art exhibits included Phantom Limbs (Transit Gallery, Harvard, Medical School, 2012); Hydrant Immigrants in “Where Do We Migrate to?” (curated by Niels Van Tomme: Parson’s New School of Design, NYC and traveling to Baltimore, El Paso, New Orleans), Off-Modern Urban, Venice Architectural Biennale, 2010; Phantasmagorias of History (in Berlin Watchtower, off-Berlin Biennale, 2010), Nostalgic Technologies, (solo shows in Ljubljana, Glasgow, Copenhagen, Kaunas and Cambridge) and Unforeseen Past (2007, NYC).
Boym did lectures/performances in Freud’s Museum in Vienna, in New York Artists’ Space, in New York, in MoMa, Vienna Kunsthalle, Carpenter Center for Visual Arts/Corbusier at 50, Ljubljana, City of Women Festival, Maison de Science de l’Homme, Paris and Moscow ICA. She has contributed to Manifesta 2012, Moscow Biennale 2013, Centre Pompidou, Paris 2010, Vienna Kunsthalle 2009, Frieze 2007 as well as to Art Forum, Photoworks, ArtMargins, Cabinet, Punto de Vista, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, Critical Inquiry, Representations, Poetics Today, and Harpers’s Magazine.
