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’, 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—national, regional, religious, and gender—and 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’s 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 University of Cambridge, 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’, Ruthenian, Muscovite, Russian, and Ukrainian art and culture; Eastern Rite Christianity; cultural politics and historic preservation in imperial Russian, the Soviet Union, Belarus’, Ukraine and Russia; visual theory, cultural memory and identity studies.
Recent research projects:
Dr. Pevny’s 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:
‘Art and Transcultural Discourse in Ukrainian lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’, 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.
‘Forum: Globalising Early Modern Central and Eastern European Art’, co-authored with Robert Born, Tomasz Grusiecki, Suzanna Ivanič, Ruth Sargent Noyes, Olenka Pevny, and Robyn Radway in Art East Central, 2022. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/14105
‘Kyiv’s Church of St Cyril of Alexandria: A Portal of Orthodox Ecumenism’. Palaeoslavica XXVII, no. 2 (2019): 1-48 [48 pages].
‘The Encrypted Narrative of Reconstructed Cossack Baroque Forms’. Harvard Ukrainian Studies, vol. 31, no.1–4 (2009-2010): 471–519. Also published in Poltava 1709: The Battle and the Myth. Ed. Serhii Plokhy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012, pp. 471–519.
‘In Fedor Solntsev’s Footsteps: Adrian Prakhov and the Restoration of the Medieval Past in Late-Nineteenth Century Kiev’. In Vizualizing Russia: Fedor Solntsev and Crafting a National Past. Ed. Cynthia Hyla Whittaker. Leiden: Brill, 2010, pp. 83–108.
‘Dethroning the Prince: Princely Benefaction and Female Patronage in Medieval Kyiv’. Harvard Ukrainian Studies, vol. 29, no. 1-4, (2007): 61–108.
Essay ‘Kievan Rus’’ 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. 156–7, 193–4, 247, 281–307, 313–319.
‘Rebuilding a Monumental Past’. East European Perspectives – J.B. Rudnyckyj Distinguished Lecture Series. Department of German and Slavic Languages, University of Manitoba, Lecture VII, 2001 https://umanitoba.ca/libraries/units/archives/grants/rudnyckyj_lecture/lecture_8.htm
Edited Books:
Майстри нашого мистецтва (Київ, Сучасність, 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’
SL3: The Making of Ukraine: History and Culture of Early Modernity