Aglaya Glebova

Aglaya K. Glebova is an American art historian and educator, currently Assistant Professor in History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in modern art, with an emphasis on interwar European avant-gardes and Soviet art, and the history and theory of photography. Her research interests include the politics of modernism, realism, and figuration between 1900 and the Cold War; avant-garde experiments in mass media, from print to cinema; and art of global socialism.

Born in Moscow, Glebova received her Bachelor of Arts degree in History of Art and Architecture from Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont, in 2007. She then went to the University of California, Berkeley, where she obtained her MA in 2009 and Ph.D. in History of Art in 2014. Her dissertation was "Photography's Undoing: Aleksandr Rodchenko and the White Sea-Baltic Canal"

Glebova is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, since July 2019. Before joining Berkeley, she was faculty in the departments of Art History and Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she taught broadly on topics ranging from silent cinema and avant-garde art of the early twentieth century to contemporary film design and the politics of photography (2014—2019.)

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. 

In her Academy project, "Mobile Modernisms: The Last Projects of the Soviet Avant-garde, 1928-1937," Glebova examines five iconic projects completed by Soviet avant-garde artists in the decade following Joseph Stalin's rise to power. In endeavoring to make sense of new political realities, the protagonists of this project—El Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin, Vera Mukhina, and Boris Ender—created objects that challenge received views of this decade as one of "totalitarian art."

Glebova has also written about Russian artist and photographer Alexander Rodchenko.

• Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
• College Art Association
• Society of Architectural Historians
• Society of Historians of East European and Russian Art and Architecture

• “‘No Longer an Image, Not Yet a Concept’: Montage and the Failure to Cohere in Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Gulag Photoessay,” Art History 42 (April 2019): 332-361.
• “Elements of Photography: Avant-garde Aesthetics and the Reforging of Nature,” Representations 142 (Spring 2018): 56-90.
• “A Visual History of the Gulag: Nine Theses,” in The Soviet Gulag: Evidence, Interpretation, and Comparison, ed. Michael David-Fox (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 162-169. Expanded and revised version of “Picturing the Gulag,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16 (Summer 2015): 476-478.
• “‘You Don’t Even Represent Us’: Picturing the Moscow Protests,” Either/And (2012), online. Reprinted in Photography Reframed, eds. Benedict Burbridge and Annabella Pollen (IB Tauris: 2018), 205-214.