September 20, 2001

Contact: Lyne Tumlinson, Center for Russian and East European Studies, (785) 864-4236

Leading expert on Russian architecture to give slide show on 'vanishing vistas'

LAWRENCE -- William Craft Brumfield, America's leading authority on Russian architecture and professional photographer, will present a slide lecture, "Lost Siberia: Vanishing Vistas of the Russian East," at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 27 in the Kansas Union Alderson Auditorium.

The lecture is sponsored by the University of Kansas Center for Russian and East European Studies, with support from their U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center grant.

Brumfield, professor of Russian studies at Tulane University in New Orleans, has photographed and written about all aspects of Russian architecture, its striking style, and its compelling history over the past 30 years. In this lecture he will present portions of his photo archive of distinctive architecture from such Siberian cities as Perm, Tiumen', Tobol'sk and Tomsk.

As the far north was the starting point for explorers, traders, and missionaries who colonized Siberia, it is appropriate that Brumfield's recent work has also taken him from the Russian North to Siberia. Brumfield's Siberian exhibition opened in 1999, with his participation in the U.S. Library of Congress educational project known as "Meeting of Frontiers."

For more information on that program, see: memory.loc.gov/intldl/mtfhtml/mfabout/mfack.html

Recent examples of Brumfield's publications include books "Lost Russia: Photographing the Ruins of Russian Architecture," "A History of Russian Architecture, " and "The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture."