- Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago, 2022
- M.A., University of California, Davis, 2012
- B.A., University of California, Davis, 2009

Nicoletta Rousseva
Visiting Assistant Professor
Visiting Assistant Professor
Dissertation: “Bad Comrades: Art and Answerability after Socialism”
Research Interests: Contemporary art in southeastern Europe, European modernisms, avant-garde journals and publications, experimental and documentary film, repetition and reenactment, political theory, aesthetic theory, comparative histories of socialism
My research and teaching explores interconnections between visual art, social history, and theory. Trained as an art historian with a focus on modern and contemporary art in southeastern Europe, I am interested in artworks that reveal points of continuity, embeddedness, and affinity with political movements and ideas across the twentieth century. In my dissertation, I studied the ways in which contemporary artists, writers, and intellectuals from Slovenia, Croatia, and Albania use repetition and reenactment to position their work in dialogue with the region’s histories of socialism and revolutionary politics.
Currently, I am revising my dissertation into a book manuscript, tentatively titled, Specters of Socialism: 1920-2020. I am also preparing two articles for publication. The first considers the artist collective IRWIN’s exhibition of portraits of World War II heroes from the collection of the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The second examines intergenerational affinities and family ties in the filmic work of Anri Sala and the writing of Lea Ypi.