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Faculty Fellow

Robert Bird

Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, and the College University of Chicago

Biography

Photo by Erielle Bakkum

Robert Bird (1969 – 2020) studied the aesthetic practice and theory of Russian modernism. His first full-length book, Russian Prospero (2006), is a comprehensive study of the poetry and thought of Viacheslav Ivanov. He was also the author of two books on the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrei Rublev (2004) and his best-known 2008 monograph, Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema, which has been translated into Chinese, Farsi, Portuguese, and Russian (his own translation). His translations of Russian religious thought include On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader (1998) and Viacheslav Ivanov's Selected Essays (2001). His biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky was published by Reaktion Books in 2012 as part of the Critical Lives series.

Topics

Featured Project

Experimental Monumentality

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2019 – 2021
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Projects

Revolutionology

Revolutionology

This project took the centenary of the Russian Revolution as an opportunity to interrogate the links between political and intellectual change, with a focus on the role of media in the dissemination of revolutionary ideas.
Beginning on the centenary of the Russian revolutions, this project questioned the concept of revolution, specifically the link between political and intellectual change. The Russian revolutions in 1917 quickly reverberated around the world, generating revolutions and political changes from East ...

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Revolutionology II: Media and Networks of Intellectual Revolution

Revolutionology II: Media and Networks of Intellectual Revolution

This project advanced the goals of the Revolutionology project to interrogate the links between political and intellectual change, with a focus on mapping the global circulation of revolutionary ideas.
This project extended an investigation of the media and networks by which ideas advocating radical change have been produced and disseminated by developing and employing a material-based or even materialist version of intellectual history. Over its first fifteen months, the project benefited from ...

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