Kevin M. F. Platt is Named Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Humanities
Kevin M. F. Platt of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures has been appointed the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Humanities in the School of Arts and Sciences. Platt’s research examines representations of Russian history and historiography, history and memory in Russia, Russian lyric poetry, and global post-Soviet Russian culture.
He is the author of Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths and History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution, and the co-editor of Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda. He edited and contributed translations to Modernist Archaist: Selected Poems by Osip Mandelstam and edited Intimations: Selected Poetry by Anna Akhmatova.
Platt is the chair of the graduate group in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and serves as the topic director for the 2012-2013 Penn Humanities Forum theme “Peripheries.” Platt was a 2011-2012 Guggenheim Fellow and received CEC Artslink grants from 2009-2011. He was an SAS Weiler Faculty Research Fellow in 2005-2006. He is a member of the Penn Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Group, and joined Penn’s faculty in 2002.
The Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Chair in the Humanities was established through the bequest of Edmund and Louise Kahn. Mr. Kahn was a 1925 Wharton graduate who had a successful career in the oil and natural gas industry, while Mrs. Kahn worked for Newsweek and owned an interior design firm. The couple created several professorships in the School of Arts and Sciences and generously supported Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, the Modern Languages College House, and other projects at Penn.
