Aglaya Glebova specializes in modern art, with an emphasis on interwar European avant-gardes and Soviet art, and the history and theory of photography. Her research interests include the politics of modernism, realism, and figuration between 1900 and the Cold War; avant-garde experiments in mass media, from print to cinema; and art of global socialism.
Glebova is the author of Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the Time of Stalin (Yale University Press, 2022), which reconsiders the relationship between art, politics, and technology during a period usually understood as the end of the critical Soviet avant-garde. The book’s publication was supported by a Graham Foundation grant. Glebova’s writing has also appeared in the journals Art History and Representations, among others. She is now at work on a project that examines ideas of economy, energy, and exhaustion in Soviet art and architecture.
Glebova’s research has been supported by the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, the University of California President’s Fellowship in the Humanities, the Canadian Center for Architecture, and the ACLS, among others. Before coming to Berkeley, she was faculty in the departments of Art History and Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she taught broadly on topics ranging from silent cinema and avant-garde art of the early twentieth century to contemporary film design and the politics of photography. At Berkeley, Glebova is also an affiliate of the Slavic Languages & Literatures Department.
Select Publications:
“‘Down with the Skyscrapers of Historical Backwardness’: Mikhail Okhitovich and the Disurbanist Revolution,” Special issue on “Another Revolution,” Modernism/Modernity Print Plus, forthcoming.
“‘No Longer an Image, Not Yet a Concept’: Montage and the Failure to Cohere in Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Gulag Photoessay,” Art History 42 (April 2019): 332–361.
“Elements of Photography: Avant-Garde Aesthetics and the Reforging of Nature,” Representations 142 (Spring 2018): 56–90.
“A Visual History of the Gulag: Nine Theses,” in The Soviet Gulag: Evidence, Interpretation, and Comparison, ed. Michael David-Fox (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 162–169.
“‘You Don’t Even Represent Us’: Picturing the Moscow Protests,” Either/And (2012), online.
- Reprinted in Photography Reframed, eds. Benedict Burbridge and Annabella Pollen (IB Tauris: 2018), 205–214.
