Year Begun: 2014
Research Interests: Gabriella holds a B.A. in Classics and Slavic Studies from Brown University and has previously worked as a Russian art cataloguer and researcher in London. Her research interests focus on modernist aesthetics and the intersection of image and text in Soviet culture. Her work has recently focused on Soviet propaganda books from the 1920s and 30s, Soviet cinema, and Moscow Conceptualism. Her dissertation, titled Propaganda Matters: On the Material Properties of Soviet Ideology,looks at the importance of materials in shaping Soviet ideological narratives.
Publications:
“First Comes the Feeling: A Dialogue with Irina Nakhova”
Interview with artist Irina Nakhova in: Irina Nakhova: Museum on the Edge, curated by Jane Sharp and JuliaTulovsky (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019). Exhibition catalogue for Irina Nakhova: Museum on the Edge at Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick
· Translation from Italian and Russian into English of “The Poetic Anthropology of Ol’ga Sedakova: In Dialogue with Sergei Averintsev and Boris Pasternak,” by Vera Pozzi in: Sandler, Stephanie, Maria Khotimsky, Margarita Krimmel, and Oleg Novikov. The Poetry and Poetics of Olga Sedakova: Origins, Philosophies, Points of Contention (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2019)
· Book Review of: Boris Arvatov, Art and Production. John Roberts and Alexei Penzin, ed. and Shushan Avagyan transl. in Slavic and Eastern European Journal (SEEJ)
· Article: “Reprocessing and Resurfacing Reality: Reworking the Everyday and the Avant-Garde in the Artistic Laboratory of Irina Nakhova.” Forthcoming in Russian in Novoe Literaturnoe Obozreniie (NLO)
· Book Review of: Soviet Women and their Art: The Spirit of Equality, ed. by Rina Lavery and Ivan Lindsay. Forthcoming in Slavic and Eastern European Journal (SEEJ)
Conference papers:
“Performing Objects: The Role of Things in Late-Soviet Propaganda” (Annual East Coast Russian History and Culture Graduate Student Conference, Washington, D.C., 2020)
“Soviet Craft Appeal: The Haptic Ideology of Soviet Illustrated Periodicals” (AATSEEL, 2020)
“The Craftsmanship of Ideology” (SHERA sponsored panel at ASEEES National Conference, 2019)
"The Ornament and the Concept: Soviet Ideological Decorative Language in Soviet Conceptualism” (AATSEEL, 2019)
“Folding and Unfolding Time: Soviet Agitational Textiles of the First Piatiletka” (ASEEES, 2018)
“Pleated Byt: The faktura of Everyday Life from Soviet Agitational Textiles to Irina Nakhova’s Surface Installations” (The Body of ThingsConference, Aarhus University, DK 2018)
“Subjects of Display: Modeling Identity on the Soviet Showbook” (ASEEES, 2017)
“Play and Display: Paper Showrooms of Soviet Subjectivity” (Symposium The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children Princeton, 2017)
“Turning the Cage Inside-Out: Sergei Parajanov’s Prison Works as Subversions of Confinement” (ASEEES, 2016)
"Strategic Beauty: The Importance of Classical Artifacts in Russia” (ASEEES, 2015)
"Bakhtin’s compass: The image of the body, the topographic gesture and their application to visual art” (Princeton-Columbia Graduate Conference, 2015)
Awards and fellowships:
ECS Research Fellowship for archival research at V&A and British Library (2019)
PIIRS Summer Research Fellowship for archival research in Russia (2018)
Portable Title VIII Fellowship for research at Neboltai! Archive in Prague (2017)
PIIRS Summer Research Fellowship for research at Neboltai! Archive (2016)