Professional Affiliation

Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Humanities, East European and Russian Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Expert Bio

Kevin M. F. Platt is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He works on representations of Russian history, Russian historiography, history and memory in Russia, Russian lyric poetry, and global post-Soviet Russian culture. Platt received his B.A. from Amherst College and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. 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 editor of Global Russian Cultures (Wisconsin UP, 2019), and the co-editor (with David Brandenberger) of Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Wisconsin UP, 2006). He has also published a number of collections of Russian poetry in translation, most recently Orbita: The Project (Arc publications, 2018). His current projects include a study of contemporary Russian culture in Latvia entitled Near Abroad and an account of the history and memory of Stalinism in the USSR and present-day Russia. 

Wilson Center Project

Tyrants and Poets: Authoritarianism and Authorship in the Russian Historical Consciousness

Project Summary

Study of the idea of authoritarian rule in Russian literature and public discourse. Public discourse under Nicholas I and Joseph Stalin, as they fashioned themselves after Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. Looks at tyrants in Russia.