About this Exhibit

"Adventures in the Soviet Imaginary" was created in conjunction with an exhibition held in the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, August 22 - December 31, 2011. A print catalog of the exhibition is available from the University of Chicago Press.

The Web exhibit was produced by Claire Roosien and Robert Bird from the work of a collaborative exhibition team (see below) with assistance from Kerri Sancomb, Kathi Beste, and Patti Gibbons. The digital images are by Judith Dartt and Molly Sober; the photography is by Michael Kenny. Elisabelth Long and Bradley Busenius provided technical and graphic design support. 

The collaborative exhibition team consisted of the following eight graduate students, one former undergraduate student, and two faculty members at the University of Chicago:

  • Robert Bird teaches Russian literature and film. He is the author of books on Fyodor Dostoevsky, Viacheslav Ivanov, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and has published widely on the aesthetics of Russian modernism.
  • Kathryn Duda is a graduate student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature.  She is interested in late Soviet culture, but enjoys a good novel from whatever period or place.
  • Leah Goldman is a Ph.D candidate in Soviet history. She holds a B.A. summa cum laude in music from UCLA, an M.Mus. in performance from Mannes College of Music, and an M.A. in social science from the University of Chicago. Ms. Goldman spent the 2009-2010 academic year conducting archival research in Moscow under the auspices of a Fulbright-Hays DDRA grant and is currently writing her dissertation, entitled “Art of Intransigence: Soviet Composers’ Fight Against Censorship, 1945-1957.”
  • Matthew Jesse Jackson teaches in the Departments of Visual Arts and Art History.
  • Michelle Maydanchik is a doctoral student in Art History. She is writing a dissertation about performance art produced in Moscow throughout the late and post-Soviet periods, focusing on actionist practices of the 1990s.
  • Daniel Phillips is a graduate student in the Department of Art History studying modern Russian art.
  • Katherine Hill Reischl is a Ph.D student in Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her research interests include Russian and Soviet photography, modernist prose, socialist realism, media aesthetics, and Russian iconography.
  • Flora Roberts is a history Ph.D candidate in the Department of History, writing a dissertation on Tajikistan during the Soviet period. She has previously worked in international development in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan, and will be conducting field research in Central Asia in 2011. Flora also has a degree in Classics from Oxford University and three young children.
  • Claire Roosien graduated in 2010 with a BA in Fundamentals: Issues and Texts and Slavic Languages and Literatures.  She spent the 2010-2011 school year studying ethnic pedagogy in the Chuvash Republic of the Russian Federation, and plans to attend graduate school beginning in 2012.
  • Andrey Shlyakhter is completing his dissertation, “Smugglers and Commissars: the Making of the Soviet Border Strip, 1917-1939,” in the Department of History.  His research interests include economic deviance, “borderness,” and Soviet state (in)security.  His departure from the USSR in 1989, at the age of eight and a half, interrupted what was by all indications a promising military career.