Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures

Research Interests

Dissertation: Bad Comrades: Art and Answerability after Socialism

Research Interests: Contemporary art and culture from across southeastern Europe, with special interest in film and performance art, repetition, reenactment, and self-historicizing practices, comparative histories of socialism, political theory, aesthetic theory, neoliberalism and late capitalism

My research and teaching explores interconnections between visual art, social history, and theory. Trained as an art historian with a focus on twentieth and twenty-first century 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 working on a book project titled Agents of History: Art at the Twenty-First Century in Southeastern Europe. This project centers of the work of female artists and filmmakers and expands the scope of my dissertation to include visual art in Serbia and Bulgaria. I am also preparing two articles for publication. The first titled “The (Post)Socialist Futures of Jasmina Cibic and Anri Sala” examines how Cibic and Sala’s films foreground site-specificity and the built environment as a means to explore socialist-era histories and political sensibilities across southeastern Europe.  The second titled “Mama’s Father’s Sisters: Intergenerational Solidarities in Postsocialist Art” considers the writing of Albanian author and philosopher Lea Ypi as a means to examine questions of historical continuity and intergenerational ties.