Olga Vaynshteyn

Born in Moscow, into the family of the renowned physicist-crystallographer B. K. Weinstein. She graduated from the Philological Faculty of Moscow State University, Department of Romance and Germanic Studies. A student of Professor A. V. Karelskiy. She studied in the postgraduate program of the Institute of World Literature of the Academy of Sciences. Doctor of Philology (2005), senior researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities of the Russian State University for the Humanities. She taught lecture courses on “The History of World Culture in the 19th Century,” “The History of Foreign Literature in the 19th Century,” “The Poetics of the Lake School,” “Methodology of Humanitarian Knowledge,” and “The Semiotics of Clothing and the Body.” Since 1993, she has been a senior researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the Russian State University for the Humanities. In 1993–1994, she worked at the Institute of Texts and Manuscripts in Paris. In 1997, she taught the course “Modeling Women” at the University of Michigan (USA). A number of O. Weinstein’s works are devoted to Jacques Derrida’s deconstructivism. A significant part of her research is devoted to the problems of vision, corporeality, costume, and the theme of clothing as text (“dress codes”). A special place in her work is occupied by dandyism as fashion, aesthetics, and a way of life, a code of conduct in European culture of the 19th–20th centuries. In a number of recent articles, guided by the concept of broad textuality, she explores the notions of the pure and the dirty, and the semiotics of smell in culture. source