Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures

Kristin Romberg (Ph.D., Columbia University) teaches courses on modern and contemporary art. She is especially interested in the forms by which knowledge, perception, and the material world are reorganized during moments of political, cultural, and epistemic revolution. Her scholarship has focused primarily on Russia and the early Soviet Union.

Romberg is the author of Gan’s Constructivism: Aesthetic Theory for an Embedded Modernism (U. of California Press, 2018). Her writing has also appeared in October, Artforum, Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, and the anthology Formy i struktury. Antologiia rossiiskogo modernizma. She has contributed to a number of museum exhibitions, including Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2020), Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test (Art Institute of Chicago, 2017), Propositions on Revolution (Slogans for a Future) (Krannert Art Museum, 2017), and Architecture in Print: Design and Debate in the Soviet Union, 1919-1935 (Wallach Art Gallery, 2005). Among the organizations that have supported her research are the American Council of Teachers of Russian, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Center for the Study of Modern Art at the Phillips Collection, the Getty Research Institute, and the Harriman Institute.

At UIUC, Romberg’s primary affiliation is with the Art History Program in the School of Art & Design. She holds secondary (0%) appointments in the European Union Center; Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian Center; Slavic Languages and Literatures; and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory.

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