Maia Toteva, Ph.D.

Dr. Maia Toteva's research and teaching are interdisciplinary and span across the fields of art history, art education, and literature. Her current projects interrogate the intersections of contemporary art, language, and critical methodologies, with a particular emphasis on the entanglements of politics, identity, and ideology in the theory and practices of visual representation. Dr. Toteva's research areas include Russian and Eastern European art in transnational contexts; global feminism/s; interculturalism and contemporary art; conceptual and post-conceptual art; discursive (epistemological) and (dis)embodied approaches to visual representation; and art and ideology in the post-truth era. She has published on topics ranging from Russian culture, Slavic literatures, and contemporary art to futurist pedagogies, feminism, and hybrid learning. Her monograph on the linguistic branch of the global conceptual art movement is forthcoming in 2024. She is also co-editor of a volume on subversive mimicry in global contemporary art, forthcoming in 2024. At Texas Tech, Dr. Toteva coordinates the Global Art and Visual Culture program. She is also affiliated faculty with the Russian Language and Area Studies program and the Women's and Gender Studies program.

Integrating interdisciplinary methods with multicultural perspectives, Dr. Toteva holds a PhD in the History of Art (contemporary art), ABD in Comparative Literature (Western European and Japanese literatures), MA in Art History (Byzantine art), and MA in Philology (Slavic languages and literatures). Before joining the faculty at TTU, she was a Visiting Professor of Art History at Montana State University and Assistant Professor of Art History at University of Cincinnati, Blue Ash College. Dr. Toteva is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including those granted from the Smithsonian Institution, the Council of European Studies, the Menil Foundation, VolkswagenStiftung and New Europe College, and the Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund. At TTU, she has received a Humanities Center Alumni College fellowship, Scholarship Catalyst Program grants, and the New Faculty Award granted by the Texas Tech Alumni Association and the College of Visual and Performing Arts. 

COURSES

UNDERGRADUATE

ART 1309 Global Art and Visual Culture

GRADUATE

ARTH 5309 Theories of Contemporary Art: Critical Theory

ART 5360 Seminar in Art Education Global Aesthetics in the Visual Arts

ART 5360 Seminar in Art Education Carnal Aesthetics: Body, Sexuality, and Gender in Contemporary Feminist Art

ART 5360 Seminar in Art Education Multiculturalism, Contemporary Art, and Pedagogy

ARTH 7000 Research

ART 5100 Advanced Art Unit

Student Work

Carnal Aesthetics: Student Reflections
School of Art Folio Gallery
April 2 - 24, 2022

This exhibit presents works created by students in Dr. Toteva's graduate seminar “Carnal Aesthetics: Body, Sexuality, and Gender in Contemporary Feminist Art” in Spring 2021. Students wrote reflections and created artwork in response to theoretical and critical issues related to global feminism, intersectionality, Black subjectivity, gender constitution and performance, displacement of subaltern voices, and the doubly oppressed female subject in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Inspired by a multicultural plurality of feminisms, the works in the exhibit approach the intersections of representation, sexuality, and gender from a feminist point of view to explore how those categories are shaped and reconstituted by societal norms and visual conventions. Hillary Russell and Jordan Long are students in the Fine Arts PhD program. Tori Quemada and Andrea Chaparro are students in the MAE program.