Aglaya is Associate Professor in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on European and Soviet modern art. She is the author Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the Time of Stalin (Yale University Press, 2022), which received Modernist Studies Association’s 2023 First Book Prize. Her research has been supported by the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, the University of California President’s Fellowship in the Humanities, the Canadian Center for Architecture, and the ACLS, among others.

Off the Grid: Energy and Exhaustion in the Global East

As a fellow at global dis:connect, Aglaya will work on a monograph on how energy was represented in the socialist world, in particular the Soviet Union, as it intersected with the imaginary of the human body and anxieties about that body’s limited energies. During her residency, she will explore how the emergence of new materials and technologies (electrification, car manufacturing, stainless steel production, off-shore drilling) were understood, throwing into sharper relief the question of how the socialist body and the socialist environment should look and function.