About SHERA

Officers

Alice Sullivan

President

2024–25

Alice Isabella Sullivan is an Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Tufts University. She is a historian of medieval art, architecture, and visual culture, specializing in the artistic production of Eastern Europe and the Byzantine-Slavic cultural spheres. Her current projects focus on the history, art, and culture of regions of the Balkan Peninsula and the Carpathian Mountains (especially in modern Romania), which developed at the crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic traditions between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Tomasz Grusiecki

President-Elect

2024–25

Tomasz Grusiecki is an Associate Professor of Early Modern European Art and Material Cultures at Boise State University. His primary field of research is the visual and material culture of the early modern period, with an emphasis on Germanic and Slavonic Europe, but he ventures out into the modern period to provide a longue-durée perspective on this region. He focuses on topics that connect past and present, including myths of cultural distinctiveness, cultural entanglement, ecocriticism, and environmental humanities.

Aglaya Glebova

Outgoing President

2024–25

Aglaya Glebova is Associate Professor of European Modern Art at UC 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.

Kasia Jeżowska

Communications Officer

2024–26

Kasia Jeżowska is a cultural historian of modern Eastern Europe. Her research focuses on the design and material cultures of state socialism, considering their industrial, political, and social dimensions during the Cold War. More broadly, she is interested in how things are mobilized in service of politics and intercultural exchanges and the role of state bureaucrats, designers, and architects in these processes. She is a Lecturer in Design History and Theory at the UNSW, Sydney.

Maja Babic

Secretary-Treasurer

2022–26

Maja Babic is an Assistant Professor of History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Dr. Babic's scholarship explores the intersection of architecture and ideology during the state-socialist and post-socialist periods in East-Central and Southeastern Europe, with a particular focus on the former Yugoslavia. She examines the intertwined nature of architectural production, urban planning, and socio-political events in the state-socialist countries of the twentieth century and the socio-political and architectural developments in contemporary post-communist Europe.

Members-at-Large

Amy Bryzgel

2024–26

Amy Bryzgel is a Teaching Professor at Northeastern University, where she teaches courses on contemporary art, visual intelligence, and upper-level courses on Performance Art and 20th century Russian Art. Prior to this, she was a Personal Chair at the University of Aberdeen, where she worked from 2009-2022. She has authored numerous books and articles on performance art in Eastern Europe.

Ksenya Gurshtein

2024–26

Dr. Ksenya Gurshtein is an independent curator, art historian, and arts writer living in Wichita, Kansas. Her area of deepest scholarly expertise is art from socialist-era Eastern Europe; she has published a number of articles, exhibition catalogue texts, and book reviews on this topic and co-edited the book Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe (Amsterdam University Press, 2022). She is also currently co-editing the fourth volume of the forthcoming The Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe. Her work strives to foreground lesser-known histories and stories, look to places and topics that have historically been peripheral to the Western canon, and support the work of arts institutions and artists as agents of social change. Her publications can be found at https://independentscholar.academia.edu/KsenyaGurshtein

Photo: Kendra Cremin

Louise Hardiman

2024–26

Dr Louise Hardiman is a historian of Russian, Ukrainian, and Soviet art and for 2024-25 is a Visiting Research Fellow at Kingston University. Her recent research and publications concern late Imperial Russian fine and decorative art, women's art, and "cold" in landscape painting; her teaching focuses on Russian art and Ukrainian art for adult learning institutions including University of Cambridge ICE. She has a Ph.D. in History of Art (University of Cambridge, 2014) and her books include Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives, co-edited with Nicola Kozicharow (2017) and Courtly Gifts and Cultural Diplomacy: Art, Material Culture and British-Russian Relations (2023), as well as two editions of folk tales by Elena Polenova.

Cosmin Minea

2024–26

Cosmin Minea is a Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) postdoctoral researcher in the Art History Department at Masaryk University in Brno and co-chair of the Environmental Humanities working group at New Europe College in Bucharest. His project in Brno is a comparison between ways in which South-East European states and regions have written their history of art and preserved their historical monuments between 1860 and 1930. His other project in Bucharest explores the relation between the historical monuments in interwar Romania and the growing interest into the exploration and preservation of the natural environment.

Olenka Z. Pevny

2024–26

Olenka Z. Pevny is University Associate Professor in Ukrainian Studies and in Medieval and Early Modern Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge. She studies the art and culture of Kyivan Rus’ and Ruthenia. She is particularly interested in the reception and acculturation of the Orthodox tradition in Eastern Slavic lands and in the place of visual culture in narratives of national, regional, religious and gender identity. Her involvement in conservation and preservation initiatives guides her interest on the ways in which scholars, theorists, politicians and cultural activists in the late Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and contemporary Ukraine and Russia relate to and interact with the medieval past.