Fellowship / Fellows

Maria Gough

  • 2011–2012
  • Humanities
  • Suzanne Young Murray Fellow
  • Harvard University
Headshot of Maria Gough
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Maria Gough is the Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. Professor of Modern Art in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her primary area of research and teaching is European modernism, with a particular emphasis on the Russian and Soviet avant-gardes. Her research has appeared in Artforum, Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, Modernism/modernity, New German Critique, October, Parkett, and Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, and she is the author of The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (University of California Press, 2005). Gough is helping to prepare a Gustavs Klucis exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art.

At the Radcliffe Institute, Gough will complete a study of the photographic practices of foreign and Soviet travelers in Russia and the Central Asian republics during the rapid industrialization and forced collectivization drive of Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan. Her chief objective is to unpack the ways in which, by the early 1930s, the Soviet experiment had become a photographic subject for the tourist gaze, and thus as much a photographic utopia as a political one.

Gough received an MA from Johns Hopkins University in 1991 and a PhD from Harvard University in 1997. Before joining the faculty in 2009, she taught at the University of Michigan and Stanford University. She is a past recipient of a Clark Fellowship, a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art and the Humanities, and the Paul Mellon Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.

Our 2023–2024 Fellows

01 / 09

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