Maria Taroutina is Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies at Brown University and specializes in the art of Imperial and early Soviet Russia. Before joining Brown University she was Associate Professor of Art History and inaugural faculty at Yale–NUS College in Singapore from 2013 to 2024. She received her PhD in the History of Art from Yale University in 2013, where she also completed her undergraduate studies in 2006.
She is the author of The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival, which was awarded the 2019 University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies. Taroutina has also co-edited three volumes, Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity, New Narratives of Russian and East European Art: Between Traditions and Revolutions and Russian Orientalism in a Global Context: Hybridity, Encounter and Representation, 1740-1940. She is currently working on two new book projects: a monograph on Mikhail Vrubel and a study of Russian imperial visual culture, tentatively titled Imperial Aesthetics: Art, Identity and Representation in Russia in the Age of Empire.
Her research derives conceptual and methodological provocations from re-examining entrenched art historical narratives, particularly with regard to questions pertaining to modernity, the historical avant-garde, and the visual culture of empire, both Tsarist and Soviet. Her approach can be characterised as revisionist and cross-temporal, aiming to challenge the linear trajectory of Russian art history in favour of a circular or synergetic model of inquiry, which considers in tandem artistic practitioners, movements, and institutions that are viewed in antithetical rather than dialogical terms.
She is the author of The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival, which was awarded the 2019 University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies. Taroutina has also co-edited three volumes, Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity, New Narratives of Russian and East European Art: Between Traditions and Revolutions and Russian Orientalism in a Global Context: Hybridity, Encounter and Representation, 1740-1940. She is currently working on two new book projects: a monograph on Mikhail Vrubel and a study of Russian imperial visual culture, tentatively titled Imperial Aesthetics: Art, Identity and Representation in Russia in the Age of Empire.
Her research derives conceptual and methodological provocations from re-examining entrenched art historical narratives, particularly with regard to questions pertaining to modernity, the historical avant-garde, and the visual culture of empire, both Tsarist and Soviet. Her approach can be characterised as revisionist and cross-temporal, aiming to challenge the linear trajectory of Russian art history in favour of a circular or synergetic model of inquiry, which considers in tandem artistic practitioners, movements, and institutions that are viewed in antithetical rather than dialogical terms.
