Svetlana Boym Svetlana Boyom of blessed memory was the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. An essayist, photographer, novelist, and playwright as well as the author of myriad scolarly articles, Dr. Boym was best known to a general readership for The Future of Nostalgia, her widely praised book of 2001 (Basic Books). In that work, which ranges meditatively over philosophy, history, art, literature, and the experience of displaced persons, she explored the web of memory and mythologizing that underpins the human longing for vanished worlds. In her 2010 Another Freedom (the University of Chicago Press), she similarly explores the notion of "freedom." Her preoccupation with these subjects was rooted partly in her own history as a Jewish émigré from the former Soviet Union. Read More Read Less