Conveners

  • Sara Pankenier Weld
    Sara Pankenier Weld
  • Sven Spieker
    Sven Spieker

Sara Pankenier Weld has taught Russian literature and culture, comparative literature, and children's literature at UCSB since 2012. Her research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian literature, comparative literature, and Scandinavian literature; avant-garde literature, art, and theory; literatures of the north; word and image; childhood, children’s literature, and picture books. In support of her research, she has received a Hellman Family Faculty Fellowship, a Dickey Center Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, as well as other travel and research grants. At Stanford University, her teaching was recognized by a Gerald J. Lieberman Fellowship in the Humanities and a Centennial Teaching Award. Sara's first book Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde, an interdisciplinary study of Russian literature, art, and theory, was published in 2014 by Northwestern University Press and received the International Research Society for Children's Literature (IRSCL) Book Award in 2015. Sara also has published numerous articles or chapters on a variety of Russian writers and artists, including Sergei Eisenstein, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Nabokov, Daniil Kharms, Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vladimir Lebedev, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Maxim Gorky. These have appeared in the journals Slavic Review, Slavic and East European Journal, and Russian Language Journal, as well as in foreign publications like Scando-Slavica, Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, Detskie chteniia, and Nedslag i børnelitteraturforskningen. Sara is now revising a book manuscript entitled Rare Books by Remarkable Russians: Toward a Radical Recontextualization of Early Soviet Picturebooks, which mounts a close analysis of image and text in little-known picturebooks by prominent Russian writers.

Sven Spieker teaches in the Slavic, Comparative Literature and Art History Programs at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in modern and contemporary art and literature, with an emphasis on Russia and East-Central Europe, and a special interest in issues related to documentary and knowledge production in art. Spieker has lectured and published on topics ranging from the historical avant-garde (Malevich, Rodchenko, Dziga Vertov) to late 20th-century art practice from Wolfgang Kippenberger to subREAL. His books and articles have appeared in German, Korean, Russian, Swedish, Polish, and English. Spieker has organized several international conferences (most recently: The Office in the Studio: The Administration of Modernism at the University of Jena, Germany). Spieker's latest book publication focused on the archive as a crucible of European modernism (The Big Archive, MIT Press, 2008; Korean translation 2014). Spieker is the founding editor of ARTMargins Print and a member of the editorial collective that runs ARTMargins Online. Current projects include a Critical Anthology of Conceptual Art in Eastern Europe; a study of Didactic Art, as well as a book about Kazimir Malevich in the media age.