Sven Spieker was born in Bonn, Germany, and has degrees (in Slavic and Eastern European Studies) from the University of London, Oxford University and the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is currently teaching at University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic Studies and the Department of History of Art and Architecture. His research interests include Russian and East-Central European literatures, contemporary art, the theory and practice of the historical avant-garde (especially in Russia and East-Central Europe), and the interplay of media, art, and philosophy. He is the author of Figures of Memory and Forgetting in Andrej Bitov's Prose: Postmodernism and the Quest for History (1996) and G0G0L: Exploring Absence: Negativity in 19th-Century Russian Literature (1999). Spieker is also the editor of ARTMargins, an online journal for contemporary art and aesthetic theory in East-Central Europe.