Bio:
Prof. Spieker's research and teaching interests include modern and contemporary art and literature, with an emphasis on Eastern and Central Europe; avant-garde studies, especially Russian; and intersections between critical theory and modern art/literature. His books include The Big Archive. Art from Bureaucracy (MIT Press, 2008) and Figures of Memory and Forgetting in Andrei Bitov's Prose (Peter Lang, 1996);he edited Bürokratische Leidenschaften. Kultur- und Mediengeschichte im Archiv (Ed. Kadmos, 2004); GOGOL: Exploring Absence. Negativity in 19th-Century Russian Literature (Ed., Slavica, 2000); and Destruction. Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge: MIT Press/Whitechapel, 2017). Spieker is currently working on a book devoted to the problem of art and the didactic. He is the executive editor of ARTMargins (http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/artm) and ARTMargins Online. Both publications are devoted to contemporary art in the expanding global margins.