Svetlana Boym
Svetlana Boym is the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Harvard University, and a media artist, playwright, and novelist. She is also an associate of the Graduate School of Design and Architecture at Harvard University.
Boym's written work explores relationships between utopia and kitsch, between memory and modernity, and between homesickness and sickness of home. Her research interests generally include 20th century Russian literature, cultural studies, comparative literature and literary studies.
Source: Wikipedia
Obit
“...nostalgia goes beyond individual psychology. At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time - the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into a private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.”
Svetlana Boym
“As for time, it is forever shrinking. Oppressed by multitasking and managerial efficiency, we live under a perpetual time pressure. The disease of this millennium will be called chronophobia or speedomania, and its treatment will be embarrassingly old-fashioned. Contemporary nostalgia is not so much about the past as about vanishing the present.”
Svetlana Boym