A native of St. Petersburg, Russia, the theorist, writer and video artist Svetlana Boym lived and worked in Boston, Massachusetts. She was a Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature and an associate of the Graduate School of Design and Architecture at Harvard University. Her work explores the relationship between utopia and kitsch, memory and modernity, nostalgia and homesickness. She is the author of numerous books and papers, including Death in Quotation Marks (1991), Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (1994), Kosmos: Remembrances of the Future (in conjunction with the photographer Adam Bartos, 2001), The Future of Nostalgia (2001), and the novel Ninochka (2003).