Kamila Kociałkowska

Kamila Kociałkowska is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Warwick, Faculty of Arts. She joined the department in 2024 after holding postdoctoral fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty/ACLS, and Harvard University’s Davis Center.

Education:

• PhD in History of Art, University of Cambridge
• MA in History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art
• MA in Fine Art, University of Edinburgh

Her research centers on modernism in Eastern Europe, especially the interplay between artistic production and systems of censorship and surveillance in the Soviet Empire and its peripheries. She employs new materialist approaches to analyze redacted and fragmented visual and textual sources, rethinking the origins of abstraction beyond traditional resistance narratives. Her work also explores the cryptographic imagination and the impact of surveillance technologies on interwar avant-garde aesthetics.

Her recent publications span topics such as Suprematist resistance, undead imagery in Stalinist propaganda, and explosive futurist texts, reflecting a deep engagement with avant-garde experimentation under repression. These works reveal recurring themes: the materiality of censorship, subversive semiotics, and the transformation of political constraint into aesthetic innovation.

Scientific Awards and Fellowships:

• Leonard A. Lauder Postdoctoral Fellow, Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art
• Visiting Scholar, Davis Center, Harvard University

She is currently completing her first book, The Black Square and the Blue Pencil: Censorship and the Stimulation of Modernist Style, which charts how censorship shaped avant-garde aesthetics in Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Azerbaijan. Her second project, Coding Modernity: The Cryptographic Imagination and the Interwar Avant-Garde, investigates the cultural history of spying and secret policing in interwar Europe. She does not currently have any listed advisees or research grants in the provided text.