Dr Olenka Pevny
- University Associate Professor in Ukrainian Studies and in Medieval and Early Modern Slavonic
- Slavonic Studies
Contact
About
Olenka Pevny is a cultural historian specialising in the medieval and early modern cultural history of Eastern Europe. Working at the intersection of cultural history and art history, she focuses on the visual and material cultures of Byzantine, Rus鈥, Ruthenian, Muscovite, Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian worlds, with particular attention to developments in Eastern Rite Christianity in these lands. She is especially interested in the ways visual culture produces historical meaning: how images, buildings, and restored monuments shape narratives of identity鈥攏ational, regional, religious, and gender鈥攁nd how these narratives are reconfigured across time. Her work approaches the medieval past as a dynamic field of cultural negotiation, in which continuity and rupture coexist. She also works on nineteenth- to twenty-first-century Ukrainian art, bringing a broad chronological perspective to questions of cultural memory and historical imagination.
Dr. Pevny鈥檚 work has been published in leading scholarly venues. Her scholarship is grounded in both archival research and direct engagement with monuments. She conducts her research in Ukraine, working extensively on site at historic monuments across the country and in major archival collections, bringing together theoretical inquiry and close attention to material form.
Before joining the 密桃视频, Dr Pevny was Associate Professor of Byzantine and Medieval Art and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Richmond, Virginia. She has worked as a curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, contributing to The Glory of Byzantium exhibition, and has also participated in archaeological fieldwork in Crimea and Greece. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
Research
Medieval and early modern cultural history of Eastern Europe; Byzantine, Rus鈥, Ruthenian, Muscovite, Russian, and Ukrainian art and culture; Eastern Rite Christianity; cultural politics and historic preservation in imperial Russian, the Soviet Union, Belarus鈥, Ukraine and Russia; visual theory, cultural memory and identity studies.
Recent research projects:
Dr. Pevny鈥檚 current research focuses on the cultural history of Ukraine in the medieval and early modern period. She also is working on two book projects: Mobilising Byzantine Imagery: A Cultural Biography of the Medieval Churches of Kyiv and Visual Obliteration of Otherness: Nineteenth-Century, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Restoration Practices in Ukraine.
Published works:
鈥楢rt and Transcultural Discourse in Ukrainian lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth鈥, in Diversity and Difference in Poland-Lithuania and Its Successor States, ed. Stanley Bill and Simon Lewis (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023), pp. 84-112.
鈥楩orum: Globalising Early Modern Central and Eastern European Art鈥, co-authored with Robert Born, Tomasz Grusiecki, Suzanna Ivani膷, Ruth Sargent Noyes, Olenka Pevny, and Robyn Radway in Art East Central, 2022. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/14105
鈥楰yiv鈥檚 Church of St Cyril of Alexandria: A Portal of Orthodox Ecumenism鈥. Palaeoslavica XXVII, no. 2 (2019): 1-48 [48 pages].
鈥楾he Encrypted Narrative of Reconstructed Cossack Baroque Forms鈥. Harvard Ukrainian Studies, vol. 31, no.1鈥4 (2009-2010): 471鈥519. Also published in Poltava 1709: The Battle and the Myth. Ed. Serhii Plokhy. 密桃视频, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012, pp. 471鈥519.
鈥業n Fedor Solntsev鈥檚 Footsteps: Adrian Prakhov and the Restoration of the Medieval Past in Late-Nineteenth Century Kiev鈥. In Vizualizing Russia: Fedor Solntsev and Crafting a National Past. Ed. Cynthia Hyla Whittaker. Leiden: Brill, 2010, pp. 83鈥108.
鈥楧ethroning the Prince: Princely Benefaction and Female Patronage in Medieval Kyiv鈥. Harvard Ukrainian Studies, vol. 29, no. 1-4, (2007): 61鈥108.
Essay 鈥楰ievan Rus鈥欌 and twenty-five catalogue entries. In The Glory of Byzantium. Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843-1261. Eds. Helen C. Evan and William D. Wixom. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997, pp. 156鈥7, 193鈥4, 247, 281鈥307, 313鈥319.
鈥楻ebuilding a Monumental Past鈥. East European Perspectives 鈥 J.B. Rudnyckyj Distinguished Lecture Series. Department of German and Slavic Languages, University of Manitoba, Lecture VII, 2001
Edited Books:
袦邪泄褋褌褉懈 薪邪褕芯谐芯 屑懈褋褌械褑褌胁邪 (袣懈褩胁, 小褍褔邪褋薪褨褋褌褜, 2006).
Perceptions of Byzantium and Its Neighbors (843-1261) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
Teaching and supervision
Rosemary Finlinson
Amelian Gardner-Thorpe
Stepan Blinder
Constance Uzwyshyn
Alice Mumford
Course contact for:
SL2: The History and Culture of Rus鈥
SL3: The Making of Ukraine: History and Culture of Early Modernity