Aglaya Glebova’s dissertation, Wilderness and Construction: Three Case Studies of Russian Landscape Representation, investigates representations of Russia’s Northern wilderness from the mid 19th century to present. Her project examines how depictions of this vast, harsh region continually shaped the national imagination and self-image. Glebova deftly draws together a diverse group of artworks, including the landscape paintings of Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898), photographs and photomontages of the White Sea-Baltic Canal by Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956), and recent Russian cinema produced in the North. Her goal, as she states, is “to examine not only how a genre of art has changed, but also how traumatic history can be both buried and unearthed in a space and its representations.”