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William Craft Brumfield

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William Craft Brumfield
BornJune 28, 1944
Charlotte, North Carolina
NationalityAmerican
Occupation(s)historian of Russian culture, architectural photographer
TitleProfessor of Slavic Studies,
Sizeler Professor of Jewish Studies, Tulane University
AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship (2000), D. S. Likhachev Prize (2014), Order of Friendship (2019)
Academic background
EducationJohns Hopkins University
Tulane University
University of California, Berkeley
Academic work
DisciplineRussian architecture
Russian literature
InstitutionsHarvard University
Tulane University
Websitehttps://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/islandora/object/tulane%3Abrumfield_stpb
Sculpture of William Brumfield by the eminent Russian artist Aleksandr Mikhailovich Shebunin, honoring Brumfield's work in the Russian North (2011).

William Craft Brumfield (born June 28, 1944) is a contemporary American historian of Russian architecture, a preservationist and an architectural photographer. Brumfield is currently Professor of Slavic studies at Tulane University.[1]

William Brumfield at an April 18, 2013 event "Memory, Commemoration, Memorialization: Moscow’s Western Battlefields" at the Kennan Institute.

Brumfield grew up in the deep American South, where he became interested in Russia by reading Russian novels. After receiving a BA from Tulane University in 1966 and an MA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968,[2] he arrived in the former Soviet Union for the first time in 1970 as a graduate student starting work in architectural photography, although he did not seriously study the craft of photography until 1974.[3] Brumfield earned a Ph.D in Slavic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973 and held a position of assistant professor at Harvard University in 1974–1980.[1]

In 1983 Brumfield, formerly a generalist of Slavic studies, established himself in the history of architecture with his first book, Gold in azure: one thousand years of Russian architecture. It was followed by The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture (1991), Russian housing in the modern age: design and social history (1993), A History of Russian Architecture (1993, Notable Book of that year[4] and a best seller[5] according to The New York Times), Lost Russia: Photographing the Ruins of Russian Architecture (1995), Landmarks of Russian Architecture: A Photographic Survey (1997) and Commerce in Russian urban culture: 1861-1914 (English edition 2001, Russian edition 2000).

In 1986 Brumfield organized the first exhibit of photographic prints from the Prokudin-Gorsky Collection at the Library of Congress.[6] Since that time Brumfield has been actively engaged in the study of Prokudin-Gorsky's photographs, including several publications for the site "Russia Beyond the Headlines".[7]

Brumfield lived in the former Soviet Union and Russia for a total of fifteen years,[8] doing postgraduate research with Moscow State University and Saint Petersburg State University,[8] but mostly travelling through the northern country, surveying and photographing the surviving relics of vernacular architecture.[3] In a 2005 interview Brumfield, asked to tell which of those journeys stood out, picked a photo survey of Varzuga, a remote village connected to civilization by 150 kilometers of a sandy clay track.[9] Brumfield donated a collection of around 1,100 photographs of northern Russian and Siberian architecture taken in 1999–2003 to the Library of Congress.[10] Part of his archive was digitized with assistance of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Washington Library.[8] The basic collection of Brumfield's photographic work is held in the Department of Images Collections at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. The William C. Brumfield Collection at the National Gallery of Art consists of 12,500 black-and-white 8" x 10" photographic prints, 40,000 negatives and over 89,000 digital files, most of which are in color (nearly 149,000 in total).[11][12][13]

In 2000 Brumfield was selected a Guggenheim Fellow for Humanities - Russian History.[8] He has been a full member of the Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences (RAASN) since 2002 and an honorary fellow of the Russian Academy of the Arts since 2006.[8] He currently holds the record for most domes captured in a single photograph.

Brumfield's fellowship support began in 1966–67 with a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship (University of California, Berkeley). In 1992–93 Brumfield was NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) Fellow at the National Humanities Center. In 2001-02 he received an American Councils/National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Fellowship. Additional fellowship and research support was provided by the International Research and Exchanges Board (1971–72, 1983–84, 1992), the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Institute (1983, 1989), the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (1999–2000), and the Trust for Mutual Understanding (2001) among others.

In 2014 the D. S. Likhachev Foundation in St. Petersburg awarded Brumfield the D. S. Likhachev Prize "for outstanding contributions to the preservation of the historic and cultural heritage of Russia."[14][15]

In 2019 Brumfield was awarded the Order of Friendship, “for the merits in strengthening friendship and cooperation between peoples, fruitful activities for the rapprochement and mutual enrichment of cultures of nations and nationalities.”[16][17] [18]

In 2021 Brumfield launched a virtual exhibition entitled "Lost America," which is based on photography done in the United States primarily in the 1970s.[19] These photographs represent an essential part of Brumfield's development as an artist, and they are the basis of an exhibition in July–August 2023 at the A. V. Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, Russia's preeminent museum devoted to the study and documentation of architecture.[20] The project is featured in an accompanying book entitled Lost America.[21]

Brumfield's first exhibit at the Shchusev State Museum, "The Russian North. The Witness of William Brumfield", opened on September 5, 2001. The exhibit consisted of several rooms devoted to Brumfield's photographic work in the historic Russian north (the region around the White Sea).[22][23]

Brumfield returned to the Shchusev with the exhibition "The Russian avant garde through the lens of an American photographer: Celebrating the Jubilee of William Brumfield". The exhibit displays some 330 of Brumfield's photographs of avant garde architecture in the USSR from the 1920s and 1930s. Taken between 1971 and 2019, the photographs range from St. Petersburg (Leningrad) to Khabarovsk.[24]

Publications

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Portrait of William Brumfield by Zoya Zhilkina
  • Gold in Azure: One Thousand Years of Russian Architecture. Boston: David Godine, 1983.
  • The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
  • A History of Russian Architecture. Cambridge University Press, 1993. This book was a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year" in 1993
  • A History of Russian Architecture, second edition. University of Washington Press, 2004
  • Lost Russia: Photographing the Ruins of Russian Architecture. Duke University Press, 1995.
  • Landmarks of Russian Architecture: A Photographic Survey. Gordon and Breach, 1997.
  • Architecture at the End of the Earth: Photographing the Russian North. Duke University Press, 2015.
  • Journeys through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky. Duke University Press, 2020.
  • Lost America («Тихая Америка»). Moscow: Tri Kvadrata, 2024. ISBN 978-5-94607-270-0
  • Russian Avant-Garde through the Lens of William Brumfield: Honoring the Master's 80 Years («Русский авангард в объективе Уильяма Брумфилда: К 80-летию мастера»). Moscow: Tri Kvadrata, 2024. Text in Russian and English. ISBN 978-5-94607-273-1.

Editor and co-author:

  • Reshaping Russian Architecture: Western Technology, Utopian Dreams. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
  • Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
  • Commerce in Russian Urban Culture, 1861–1914. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

With financial support from the Kennan Institute, the publisher «Три квадрата» (Tri Kvadrata) began in 2005 to release the series Открывая Россию/Discovering Russia by Brumfield:

  • Totma: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (Moscow, 2005)
  • Irkutsk: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2006)
  • Tobolsk: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2006)
  • Solikamsk: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2007)
  • Cherdyn: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2007)
  • Kargopol: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2007)
  • Chita: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2008)
  • Buriatiia: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2008)
  • Solovki: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2008)
  • Kolomna: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2009)
  • Suzdal: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2009)
  • Torzhok: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2010)
  • Usol'e: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2012)
  • Smolensk: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2014)
  • Chukhloma Region: Architectural Heritage in Photographs = Чухломский край: архитектурное наследие в фотографиях (Moscow, 2016; Discovering Russia, issue 15). ISBN 978-5-94607-208-3
  • Pereslavl-Zalesskii: Architectural Heritage in Photographs = Переславль-Залесский: архитектурное наследие в фотографиях (Moscow, 2018; Discovering Russia, issue 16). ISBN 978-5-94607-222-9
  • Ekaterinburg: Architectural Heritage in Photographs = Екатеринбург: архитектурное наследие в фотографиях (Moscow, 2023; Discovering Russia, issue 17). ISBN 978-5-94607-265-6

With financial support from the "Vologodskie Zori" Fund (Vologda, Russia), the publisher «Три квадрата» (Tri Kvadrata) began in 2005 to release the Vologda series by Brumfield on the architectural heritage of the Vologda region:

  • Vologda Album (2005)
  • Velikii Ustiug (2007)
  • Kirillov. Ferapontovo (2009)
  • Ustiuzhna (2010)
  • Belozersk (2011)
  • Vologda (2012)
  • Cherepovets: Architectural Heritage of the Cherepovets Region, Moscow: Tri Kvadrata Publishers, 2017, ISBN 978-5-94607-218-2.

Electronic photographic collections

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Other publications

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Interviews

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  • Brumfield, W.С. (2016), "Faded Glory in Full Color: Russia's Architectural History (Interview with William Craft Brumfield)", Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 17 (2): 379–404, doi:10.1353/kri.2016.0031, S2CID 159806547.

Audio and Video

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Bibliography

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  • Glushchenko, N. D. (2017), "Discovering Russia: The Books of William Brumfield about Russian Architecture", Znanie. Ponimanie. Umenie, 14 (4): 257–266, doi:10.17805/zpu.2017.4.23.

References

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  1. ^ a b "William Craft Brumfield (faculty profile)". Tulane University. Archived from the original on February 8, 2017.
  2. ^ John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Reports of the president and of the treasurer (2000), p. 56.
  3. ^ a b Ian Mitchell (September 2009). "Professor William Craft Brumfield – Architectural Historian Extraordinaire". Passport Moscow magazine.
  4. ^ "Notable Books of the Year 1993, page 2". The New York Times. December 5, 1993.
  5. ^ "Best Sellers". The New York Times. November 7, 1993.
  6. ^ "The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated: The Empire That Was Russia". Library of Congress.
  7. ^ "Discovering Russia". Russia Beyond the Headlines.
  8. ^ a b c d e "William Craft Brumfield (Guggenheim Fellowship biography)". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. 2000.
  9. ^ Michele A. Berdy (April 2005). "William Craft Brumfield, Campaigner". Passport Moscow magazine.
  10. ^ "The William C. Brumfield Collection - About the Collection". Library of Congress. 2004.
  11. ^ "Travels Across Russia: Murom". National Gallery of Art. Archived from the original on 2019-11-03.
  12. ^ "Featured Photographers and Campaign Organizers". National Gallery of Art. Archived from the original on 2019-07-30.
  13. ^ "William C. Brumfield Collection. Collection Summary". National Gallery of Art. Archived from the original on 2019-07-30.
  14. ^ "Сокуров стал лауреатом премии имени Лихачева". Interfax Russia. 2014.
  15. ^ "Russian architecture expert William Brumfield awarded Likhachev Prize". Russia Beyond the Headlines. 2014.
  16. ^ "Указ Президента Российской Федерации от 26 октября 2019 года № 523 "О награждении государственными наградами Российской Федерации"". Официальный интернет-портал правовой информации. 2019-10-28. Archived from the original on 2019-11-02.
  17. ^ "Президент России наградил американского исследователя русской архитектуры Уильяма Брумфилда орденом Дружбы". Культура в Вологодской области. 2019-11-01. Archived from the original on 2019-11-02.
  18. ^ "The President of Russia has awarded the Order of Friendship to William Brumfield, American historian of Russian architecture". Cultinfo.ru: Culture in Vologda Region. 2019-11-14. Archived from the original on 2019-11-18.
  19. ^ "Lost America: Photographs by William Brumfield | Tulane University". lostamerica.wp.tulane.edu. Retrieved 2023-07-24.
  20. ^ "William Brumfield. Lost America (Уильям Брумфилд. Тихая Америка)". muar.ru. Retrieved 2023-07-24.
  21. ^ "William Brumfield's new book Lost America has just appeared!". Schusev State Museum of Architecture. February 15, 2024.
  22. ^ Balakhovskaia, Faina (10 September 2001). "Russkii sever otkryt: fotografii amerikanskogo professora pokazany v Muzee arkhitektury".
  23. ^ "Russkii Sever. Svidetel'stvo Uil'iama Brumfilda".
  24. ^ "The exhibition "The Russian avant garde through the lens of an American photographer. Celebrating the jubilee of William Brumfield"". muar.ru. Retrieved 2024-07-27.
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