Literature and Culture Seminar: Kevin Platt, “The Many Afterlives of the Russian Avant-Garde, or: What was the Modernist Moment and What is Left of It?”

Date: 

Monday, October 23, 2017, 4:15pm

Location: 

CGIS South S354, 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA 02138

Dr. Kevin Platt is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Russian and East European Studnes at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his B.A. from Amherst College (1989) and his Ph.D. from Stanford University (1994) and taught at Pomona College before joining the University of Pennsylvania faculty in 2002. He has been the recipient of grants from IREX, NCEEER, Fulbright-Hays and other programs, and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011-12.

He works on representations of Russian history, Russian historiography, history and memory in Russia, Russian lyric poetry, and global post-Soviet Russian culture. He is the author of Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths (Cornell UP, 2011) and History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution (Stanford, 1997; Russian edition 2006), and the co-editor (with David Brandenberger) of Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Wisconsin UP, 2006). He has also edited and contributed translations to a number of books of Russian poetry in English translation, most recently Hit Parade: The Orbita Group (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015). His current projects include a critical historiography of Russia, a study of contemporary Russian culture in Latvia and an edited volume titled Russian Culture and Global Situations.