New professor of Philosophy and Aesthetic Theory as of 1.10.: Alexei Penzin

Dr. Alexei Penzin received his PhD from the Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. His research centres on contemporary interpretations of Marxist thought, continental philosophy and critical theory, contemporary art theory, and Soviet and post-Soviet intellectual and cultural history.

Penzin has published his research in numerous journal articles in such journals as Rethinking Marxism, Mediations, South Atlantic Quarterly, Manifesta Journal, Crisis and Critique, Radical Philosophy, e-flux journal, as well as in many edited collections. His essay Rex Exsomnis (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2012) was part of the documenta13 series. Penzin edited and authored an afterword for the Russian translation of The Grammar of Multitude by Paolo Virno (2013), and co-edited, with John Roberts, the English translation of the book Art and Production by Boris Arvatov, one of the key theorists of the Soviet Avant-garde (2017). He is also co-editor and co-author of the book Politics of the Many. Contemporary Radical Thought and the Crisis of Agency (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). He has presented papers and given lectures at many international conferences and academic and cultural venues, including Historical Materialism annual conferences, ‘Former West’ congresses, dOCUMENTA13 in Kassel, the Goethe Institute, Serpentine Gallery, Yale University, and the University of Oxford.

Penzin is one of the founding members of the group Chto Delat (“What is to be done?”), an internationally recognised collective of artists, writers and academics. Penzin is also a member of the editorial boards of the journal Stasis and the Moscow Art Magazine. Currently, he is preparing his book Sleep and Subjectivity in Capitalist Modernity, for publication by Bloomsbury Academic in 2024.

Before joining the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna as a Visiting Professor, Alexei Penzin has taught courses and seminars in continental philosophy and aesthetic theory at the University of Wolverhampton (UK), the University of Tromsø, the Fondazione Pistoletto, and many other institutions.