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 works on global socialist and Russian cultures, history and memory in Russia and and Eastern Europe, and Russian and Latvian lyric poetry. His most recent book is Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians Between World Orders (Cornell UP, 2024).
He is also 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
Essay: “Culture, Imperialism, and the Other Russias.” Current History. Volume 123, Issue 855. October, 2024. Pp. 274-276.
«Русскоязычная антиимперская поэтика: модели деколонизации» (“Russophone Poetic Anti-Empires: Models of Decolonization”), Новое литературное обозрение, No. 188 НЛО (4/2024).
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Border Condition: Russian-Speaking Latvians, Between World Orders Kevin M. F. Platt Cornell University Press, 2024 |
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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 2025 Courses:
REES 6175: History and Memory in/of Socialism
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.
