Research Expertise and Interest

Soviet art, photography, European avant-gardes, global modern art

Research Description

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.