Russian and East European Studies
Professor of Russian and East European Studies
Graduate Chair
Dr. Platt received his B.A. from Amherst College (1989) and his Ph.D. from Stanford University (1994) and taught at Pomona College before joining the University of Pennsylvania faculty in 2002. He has been the recipient of grants from IREX, NEH, NCEEER, Fulbright-Hays and other programs, and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011-12.
Dr. Platt is on leave for the 2022-2023 academic year with the support of a grant from the NEH.
Dr. Platt works on history and memory in Russia and and Eastern Europe, Russian and Latvian lyric poetry, global socialist and Russian cultures, representations of Russian, Baltic and Soviet history, and Russian historiography. His new book, Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians Between World Orders, is forthcoming from Cornell University/Northern Illinois University Press.
He is the author of Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths (Cornell UP, 2011) and History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution (Stanford, 1997; Russian edition 2006). He is the editor of Global Russian Cultures (Wisconsin UP, 2018) and the co-editor (with David Brandenberger) of Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Wisconsin UP, 2006).
Dr. Platt is the organizer of Your Language My Ear, a periodic Russian–English poetry translation symposium that takes place at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also edited and contributed translations to a number of books of Russian poetry in English translation, most recently Orbita: The Project (Arc Publications, 2018) and Hit Parade: The Orbita Group (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015).
His current project is a study of global cultural exchange in the twentieth century entitled Cultural Arbitrage in the Age of Three Worlds: How Transnational Exchange Defined Cold War Cultures. He is also working on a study of history and memory in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.
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Selected Publications
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Kevin M. F. Platt, editor Wisconsin University Press, 2018 |
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Artur Punte, Vladimir Svetlov, Sergej Timofejev, Semyon Khanin Kevin M. F. Platt, lead translator Arc Publications, 2018 |
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Artur Punte, Vladimir Svetlov, Sergej Timofejev, Semyon Khanin Kevin M. F. Platt, editor and lead translator Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015 |
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Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths Kevin M. F. Platt Cornell University Press, 2011 |
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Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda Edited by Kevin M. F. Platt and David Brandenberger University of Wisconsin Press, 2005 |
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History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution Kevin M. F. Platt Stanford University Press, 1997
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Courses Taught
Fall 2023 Courses
REES 0130 Portraits of Soviet Society
REES/COML/ENGL 6430 20th- and 21st-Century Russian Literature and Film
Spring 2022 Courses
REES155/655 Masterpieces of 20th Century Russian Literature
REES503 Introduction to Russian and East European Studies II
Affiliations
Member of the Penn Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Group, Member of the Graduate Groups of the Departments of History of Art, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, English, and History. Affiliated faculty in Cinema Studies and Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies. Past president of the American Association of Teachers of Russian and East European Languages.
