Svetlana Boym was a writer and Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard. She is the author of The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Kosmos: Remembrances of the Future (2001 with Adam Bartos), Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (1994), and Death in Quotation Marks (1991), as well as of short stories, plays, and photographic installations. Her first novel, Ninochka, was published in fall 2003. Boym wrote extensively on politics of memory and urban memorials, contemporary art and film, and postcommunist condition and exile. Her most recent book, Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea, a broad exploration of cross-cultural understanding of the idea of freedom, from the Greeks to Arendt, was published in 2010. Boym was a native of Leningrad/St. Petersburg and had lived in the United States since 1981.