Svetlana Boym is a Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Harvard University and the Associate of Harvard School of Design and Architecture. Writer, theorist and media artist, she is the author of many books including The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Architecture of the Off-Modern (2008), Territories of Terror: Memory and Mythology of Gulag (exhibit and catalogue 2006), and the novel Ninochka (2003). Her newest book, Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea(Chicago University Press, 2010), spans from Greek tragedy to contemporary art scandals, and explores cross-cultural conceptions of freedom and the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

Professor Boym is interested in exploring “third-way” thinking and alternative cultural geneologies that she calls “off-modern.” She has written broadly on literary and cultural myths in Russia and Eastern Europe, on modern conspiracy theories and the space of freedom, as well as on conceptual art and architecture for Harper's Magazine, Frieze Projects(London), Representations, Slavic Review, Poetics Today and Critical Inquiry, as well asArtforum and Artmargins. As a practicing artist she exhibited her work widely in New York, Berlin, Copenhagen, Ljubljana and Glasgow. In her recent work that combines political philosophy and aesthetics, Boym examines the relationship between utopia and kitsch, memory and modernity, homesickness and sickness of home. For more information, visit Svetlana Boym's website.