NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY RESEARCH INITIATIVE IN RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY, LITERATURE, AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT

Clemena Antonova is a Bulgarian scholar based in Vienna, Austria, where she is the Research Director of the Eurasia in Global Dialogue Programme at the Institute for Human Sciences. She was educated at Sofia University, Bulgaria before she moved to Great Britain, where she read art history at the universities of Edinburgh and Oxford. She works on topics relating to Russian religious philosophy and its continuing relevance in our contemporary modernity with a focus on what she calls “visual thought” in the Russian philosophical tradition.

Clemena has done extensive research on Pavel Florensky (1882-1937), one of the most important figures at the beginning of the twentieth century. Among her most important publications are her two books Space, Time, and Presence in the Icon: Seeing the World with the Eyes of God, (Ashgate, 2010) and Visual Thought in Russian Religious Philosophy: Pavel Florensky’s Theory of the Icon, (Routledge, 2020),  her contributions to two Oxford Handbooks – “The Icon and Visual Arts at the Time of the Russian Religious Renaissance” in The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought (2020) and “The Icon in Eastern Orthodox Apophatic Thought: Perspectives from the Early Twentieth Century” in “The Oxford Handbook of Apophatic Theology” (forthcoming) - and a dozen of articles in Sobornost, Cithara, Leonardo, etc. Recently, Clemena guest-curated the exhibition “Icons for Our Time: Orthodox Art from around the World” at the Museum of Russian Icons, USA (14 October 2021-3 April 2022).