Nina Gurianova (Gourianova, PhD in Art History, Moscow State University, 1993; PhD in Russian Literature, Columbia 2001), Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Northwestern University. Her scholarship in the fields of literature and art history encompasses both Russian and European modernist and avant-garde movements, with a specific emphasis on the interrelation and mutual influence of aesthetics and politics. Another, no less important problem she addresses deals with the profound symbiosis of the literary and the visual. Gurianova served as the primary curatorial consultant to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) on the exhibition of Russian Futurist and Constructivist books in 2002, and participated in the organization of many exhibitions, including "Amazons of the Avant-garde"(1999) and "Kazimir Malevich" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2003), as well as “Cubisti e Cubismo” in Rome (2013). She published extensively in Europe, the United States and Russia. Her first monograph, Exploring Color: Olga Rozanova and the Russian Avant-Garde (Routledge, 2000), was considered by critics “an important book not only because it is the first authoritative in-depth study on Olga Rozanova, but because it also contributes significantly to understanding the principles of the correspondences between painting and poetry.” (The Art Book, v.7, 3, June 2000, p. 7.) Nina Gurianova’s most recent book, The Aesthetics of Anarchy (Berkeley: University of California Press,2012) has won AATSEEL (American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages) Best Book in Literary/Cultural Studies annual award. It explores the question of art and ideology in the pre-revolutionary Russian avant-garde. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, William F. Milton Fund, and IREX.
