Rate My Professor Kristin Romberg

Kristin Romberg, Associate Professor of Art History and Chair of the Art History Program in the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University. She teaches courses on modern and contemporary art, particularly exploring the forms through 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 holds secondary appointments in the European Union Center, the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Her research areas include aesthetics and genre, affect studies and psychoanalysis, biopolitics, empire and globalization, materialism, media studies, other futures, race, indigeneity, gender, and sexuality.

Romberg authored Gan’s Constructivism: Aesthetic Theory for an Embedded Modernism (University of California Press, 2018). Her writing has appeared in October, Artforum, Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, and the anthology Formy i struktury. Antologiia rossiiskogo modernizma. She contributed to 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). Other publications encompass "First Exhibition of Contemporary Architecture" in Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented, 1918–1939—The Merrill C. Berman Collection (2020), "Art in the Age of Binary Inversion: Russian Constructivist Graphic Design and the Interwar Grid" in New Narratives of Russian and East European Art: Between Traditions and Revolutions (2019), a translation in Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne (2019), and a review of T. Vujošević's Modernism and the Making of the Soviet New Man in caa.reviews (2019). Her work has been supported by 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.