John Webley

John Webley is a joint PhD student in Slavic Languages and Literature and History of Art. He holds a BA in Russian and Art History from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA from Columbia in Art History, where he wrote his thesis on the representation of jewelry in Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s portraits of European monarchs. John is broadly interested in questions of how modernity, empire, and aesthetics are intertwined in the 19th-century Russian context. His dissertation examines the development of Russian imperial discourse between 1855-1917 during the so-called “Great Game”, through Russian poems, paintings, and travelogues depicting India and the British Empire. His secondary research project is on literary and visual depictions of night in Russia, and how these reflect Russia’s engagement with industrialization and science.