DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

Christina Kiaer (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) teaches Global modern art and visual culture in the twentieth-century, specializing in the Soviet Union and the art of international socialism, with special interests in the avant-garde and Socialist Realism, collective art practices, textiles, the aesthetics of anti-racism, the lived experience of socialism and revolution, women and everyday life, consumption, and affect. In 2024, she curated the exhibition Collective Threads: Anna Andreeva at the Red Rose Silk Factory, at the Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki; she also edited and contributed to the catalogue. Her book Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024. In 2017, for the centennial of the Russian Revolution, she was co-curator, with Robert Bird and Zachary Cahill, of the exhibition Revolution Every Day at the Smart Museum, University of Chicago, and co-author of the accompanying book, Revolution Every Day: A Calendar (Milan: Mousse Publishing, with the Smart Museum of Art, 2017). Her first book, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism, was published by MIT Press in 2005; that same year she also published an interdisciplinary volume of essays, Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Indiana University Press; co-edited with Eric Naiman). She is currently completing the project “Aesthetics of Anti-racism: Black Americans in Soviet Visual Culture.”

Kiaer serves on the Steering Committee of the Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies (REEES) Research Program in Weinberg College. In opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she co-organized the international symposium “The Collective Body Dismembered: Histories of Art, Identities and the War in Ukraine” at the National Gallery of Denmark on May 31, 2022 (see thecollectivebody.net). She was in Copenhagen that year on a Novo Nordisk Foundation Visiting Professorship at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. She has held postdoctoral research grants from the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, Northwestern University; the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the American Philosophical Society; the Social Science Research Council; and the J. Paul Getty Foundation, among others.

Program Area: Global Modern and Contemporary

Regional Specialization: Europe, the Soviet empire and transnational socialism

Regional Interests: Twentieth-century art and visual culture, specializing in transnational socialism, collective art practices, textiles, the visual culture of anti-racism, the politics of realism and the avant-garde, and feminist theory and art.

Selected Publications

Editor and contributor, Collective Threads: Anna Andreeva at the Red Rose Silk Factory (Scheidegger & Spiess; distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2025)

Christina Kiaer, Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism (University of Chicago Press, 2024)

Contributor, The Wayland Rudd Collection: Exploring Racial Imaginaries in Soviet Visual Culture, ed. Evgeniy Fiks (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021).

Contributor, Comintern Aesthetics, eds. Amelia Glaser and Steven S. Lee (University of Toronto Press, 2020).

Revolution Every Day: A Calendar, co-authored with Robert Bird and Zachary Cahill (Milan: Mousse Publishing, with the Smart Museum of Art, 2017)

Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005, reprint 2008).

Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside, co-edited with Eric Naiman (Indiana University Press, 2005).