Books
Imperial Aesthetics: Art, Identity, and Representation in Russia in the Age of Empire interrogates the complexities of race, ethnicity, imperialism, and their visualization in Russia from the late eighteenth century to the early Soviet period. Through an exploration of a dynamic triadic model involving Europe, Russia, and Asia, the book considers how the so-called “Orient” became an important discursive site from which Russia’s own political, social, and cultural shortcomings could be recognized and critiqued. It likewise aims to excavate the lived experiences of the ethnically diverse peoples and marginalized communities in Russia’s imperial orbit. One of the key driving questions of the book is to ascertain the degree to which nineteenth-century Russian visual culture was complicit in systems of power and oppression on the one hand and to what extent it advanced anti-imperial and anti-autocratic discourses on the other, especially in territories that were themselves on the fault lines between the East and the West. Lastly, the book investigates the parallels and divergences between distant and intra-imperial racialized identities and the varying ways in which these evolved from the Tsarist to the early Soviet periods.
Visual History of the Conquest of Turkestan by the Russian Empire, 1860–1900: Testimonies, Representations, Commemoration, Decolonization
Co-edited with Svetlana Gorshenina, Sergei Abashin and Ian Campbell
The volume addresses a major gap in the scholarship on Russian imperial expansion by examining the visual dimensions of the conquest of Central Asia. While debates about the colonial nature of Russia’s advance into Turkestan have largely focused on political, military, and economic questions, far less attention has been paid to the images through which the conquest was documented, imagined, commemorated, and later remembered. The project investigates a wide range of visual media — including photography, drawing, painting, print culture, monuments, museum displays, and exhibition practices — to explore how the conquest was represented during the imperial period and subsequently reframed during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras.
Co-edited with Svetlana Gorshenina, Sergei Abashin and Ian Campbell
The volume addresses a major gap in the scholarship on Russian imperial expansion by examining the visual dimensions of the conquest of Central Asia. While debates about the colonial nature of Russia’s advance into Turkestan have largely focused on political, military, and economic questions, far less attention has been paid to the images through which the conquest was documented, imagined, commemorated, and later remembered. The project investigates a wide range of visual media — including photography, drawing, painting, print culture, monuments, museum displays, and exhibition practices — to explore how the conquest was represented during the imperial period and subsequently reframed during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras.
Articles and Book Chapters
Special guest issue of Art East Central on Transnational and Transcultural Perspectives on Artistic Migration from the Former Russian Empire
Bringing together scholars working across art history, migration studies, and Slavic studies, this guest-edited journal issue examines the movement of artists, objects, and aesthetic ideas across national and imperial boundaries, while foregrounding questions of exile, diaspora, cultural hybridity, and transnational exchange in times of war and political upheaval. More specifically, it aims to broaden the geographical scope of migration routes from the territories of the former Russian empire beyond Western Europe and the USA to include other important cities of arrival or transit, such as Istanbul, Shanghai, Tokyo, Bombay, Buenos Aires, and the cities of the Caribbean and Australia. By bringing together diverse case studies and comparative approaches, the journal issue seeks to explore how different environments have shaped artistic ideas, production, networking, and institutionalization. Key questions include the reciprocal interactions between new environments, migrant artists, dynamic urban spaces, and the articulation of modernist aesthetics.
Bringing together scholars working across art history, migration studies, and Slavic studies, this guest-edited journal issue examines the movement of artists, objects, and aesthetic ideas across national and imperial boundaries, while foregrounding questions of exile, diaspora, cultural hybridity, and transnational exchange in times of war and political upheaval. More specifically, it aims to broaden the geographical scope of migration routes from the territories of the former Russian empire beyond Western Europe and the USA to include other important cities of arrival or transit, such as Istanbul, Shanghai, Tokyo, Bombay, Buenos Aires, and the cities of the Caribbean and Australia. By bringing together diverse case studies and comparative approaches, the journal issue seeks to explore how different environments have shaped artistic ideas, production, networking, and institutionalization. Key questions include the reciprocal interactions between new environments, migrant artists, dynamic urban spaces, and the articulation of modernist aesthetics.
"Objects of Empire: Catherine II’s Orientalist Ceramics"
This chapter examines how Catherine II’s victories over the Ottoman Empire were translated into material form through porcelain wares produced for courtly and popular use. Situating Russian turquerie within the context of sustained Russo-Ottoman conflict, it argues that Orientalist imagery in late eighteenth-century Russia fused frivolity with force and aesthetic refinement with political authority, operating simultaneously as exotic display and as a visual technology of domination and control. Through a close reading of the Service with Allegories of Russia’s Victories in the War with Turkey (1775) and a series of figural drinking vessels manufactured by the Gardner Factory, the chapter traces how imperial power was produced, circulated, and contested through objects whose fragility was inseparable from their ideological function. Foregrounding fragility as the organizing condition of this imperial material culture — at once a property of the porcelain medium, a condition of Catherine’s political legitimacy, and a structural feature of Russia’s claim to civilizational distinction from the empire it sought to defeat — the chapter demonstrates how a female sovereign conscripted the most delicate and feminized of aristocratic media to render conquest legible, pleasurable, and enduring.
"Conquering by Design: Catherine II and the Architectural Imagination of Empire"
This chapter discusses Catherine II’s use of architecture as a speculative instrument of imperial projection in the eastern Mediterranean, focusing on the symbolic and ideological work performed by a number of radically divergent structures erected within the same royal site: the Kagul Obelisk, Chesme Column and Turkish Kiosk in the Catherine Park at Tsarskoe Selo and the Cathedral of St. Sophia in the adjacent town of Sophia. Read in relation to Catherine’s so-called “Greek Project,” these buildings articulate distinct modes of “conquering” the Ottoman Empire — through classical allusion, aesthetic containment and Orientalist play on the one hand, and spiritual succession and civilizational replacement on the other. Their coexistence within a single landscape reveals the multivalence of Catherine’s imperial imagination and underscores architecture’s role not merely as commemoration, but as a conceptual medium through which empire could be rehearsed, tested, and metaphorically secured prior to territorial realization.
This chapter discusses Catherine II’s use of architecture as a speculative instrument of imperial projection in the eastern Mediterranean, focusing on the symbolic and ideological work performed by a number of radically divergent structures erected within the same royal site: the Kagul Obelisk, Chesme Column and Turkish Kiosk in the Catherine Park at Tsarskoe Selo and the Cathedral of St. Sophia in the adjacent town of Sophia. Read in relation to Catherine’s so-called “Greek Project,” these buildings articulate distinct modes of “conquering” the Ottoman Empire — through classical allusion, aesthetic containment and Orientalist play on the one hand, and spiritual succession and civilizational replacement on the other. Their coexistence within a single landscape reveals the multivalence of Catherine’s imperial imagination and underscores architecture’s role not merely as commemoration, but as a conceptual medium through which empire could be rehearsed, tested, and metaphorically secured prior to territorial realization.