Oksana Chefranova awarded NEH grant for book project

Oksana Chefranova, associate research scholar in the Film & Media Studies Program, is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowship.

The NEH announced $30.9 million for 188 humanities projects nationwide. Grant awards support innovative digital projects for the public, humanities initiatives on college campuses, and infrastructure projects at cultural institutions.

Chefranova’s project is titled “From Garden to Kino: Evgenii Bauer, Cinema, and Genealogies of Built Environment in Modern Russian Culture.” The book examines a history of built environments in Late Imperial Russia through the prism of artistic output of Evgenii Bauer, whose movement across different media reveals a vital context surrounding the arrival of cinema. Chefranova analyzes the practices of designing milieu and image-making between 1878 and 1917, while arguing that the built environment traverses boundaries between the world of nature and culture, encapsulates philosophical and narrative systems, and serves as an epistemic tool for understanding paradoxes of modernity at the crisscross of the 19th and 20th centuries.