Barbara Kukushkina

Barbara / Varvara Kukushkina studies the intellectual and visual culture of the Russian Empire from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century. A native of Cherepovets, Russia, she obtained her bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature and Linguistics from the Higher School of Economics (HSE) University in Saint Petersburg in 2015, completing a thesis on Emilij Medtner’s Reflections on Goethe. It was at HSE that Barbara’s interest in Russian modernism was first piqued. This interest would later mature into serious scholarly dedication, and in 2018, she became a member of the research team ‘Intellectual History of Russian Modernism’ led by Professor Ilona Svetlikova; the project gradually turned into a study of the cultural role of astronomy at the turn of the twentieth century and continues to bear fruit in various publications.

After completing her undergraduate degree, in 2021, Barbara earned a master’s degree in art history from the European University in Saint Petersburg. Her thesis focused on the unique, albeit anachronistic, project of the Kievan psychiatrist Ivan Sikorsky, a passionate advocate of physiognomy as both a powerful diagnostic tool and a universal means of ‘reading’ works of art, from ancient sculptures to ‘contemporary’ masterpieces by Repin and Vasnetsov. This research trajectory later led her to investigate the physiognomic undercurrents in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1930s novel ‘Despair’.

Prior to enrolling at Harvard’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Barbara worked as a docent at the Joseph Brodsky museum ‘A Room and a Half’ from 2021 to 2024. Currently she is a third year graduate student; she focuses primarily on diverse materials both from the nineteenth and early twentieth century, although her research interests extend well beyond this period. Her research experience in the US channeled her curiosity into two specific lines of inquiry: the cultural role of psychiatry and physiognomy, as well as the history of prints and printed media in literary fiction, popular science literature and the periodical press.

Photo: Alexander Kukushkin