Kevin Platt
Associate Professor and Department Chair
Office Hours: M 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Email: kmfplatt@sas.upenn.edu
Fall 2008 Courses
SLAV 623 Historiography of Imperial and Soviet Russia
Biography
Kevin M. F. Platt is Associate Professor and Chair of the Slavic Department. He works on representations of Russian history, Russian historiography, and history and memory in Russia. Additionally, he frequently writes on Russian lyric poetry. Platt received his B.A. from Amherst College and his Ph.D. from Stanford University and taught at Pomona College before joining the Penn faculty in 2002. He is the author of History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution (Stanford, 1997; Russian edition 2006), and the co-editor (with David Brandenberger) of Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Wisconsin UP, 2006). Platt has published chapters and articles on Russian history and historiography, film, art and the poetry of Pushkin, Boriatinsky, Pasternak, Zabolotsky, Chukovsky and Kibirov. He also edited and contributed translations to Modernist Archaist: Selected Poems by Osip Mandelstam (Whale and Star, 2008). He is currently completing a book about the modern historical and cultural mythologies of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great entitled Ivan and Peter: Towards a Cultural Historiography of Russia. His new projects include a study of 20C history and memory among Russian-speaking populations in the Baltic, a book on Russian lyric poetry and history, and a translation project on Marina Tsvetaeva.
Select Recent Publications:
“Rehabilitation and Afterimage: Aleksei Tolstoi’s Many Returns to Peter the Great.” Kevin M. F. Platt and David Brandenberger, eds.. Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.
“History,
Inertia and the Unexpected: Recycling Russia’s Despots.”
Common Knowledge. No. 10:1 (2004). Pp. 130-150.
