Taroutina is the author of The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival, which was awarded the 2019 University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. She has also co-edited three volumes, Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity, New Narratives of Russian and East European Art: Between Traditions and Revolutions and Russian Orientalism in a Global Context: Hybridity, Encounter and Representation, 1740-1940. She is currently working on two new book projects: a monograph on Mikhail Vrubel and a study of Russian imperial visual culture, tentatively titled Imperial Aesthetics: Art, Identity and Representation in Russia in the Age of Empire.

Taroutina's research re-examines and challenges entrenched art historical narratives, particularly with regard to questions pertaining to modernity, the historical avant-garde, and the visual culture of empire, both Tsarist and Soviet. Her approach can be characterised as revisionist and cross-temporal, aiming to challenge the linear trajectory of Russian art history in favour of a circular or synergetic model of inquiry, which considers in tandem artistic practitioners, movements, and institutions that are viewed in antithetical rather than dialogical terms.

Taroutina's research has been funded by a number of different institutions and organizations, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Georgette Chen Trust and the Paul Mellon Centre. 

Slavic Studies

History of Art and Architecture

Taroutina embraces a comparative approach to teaching that is attuned to multiple contexts, histories, and geographies. She has taught a number of surveys on European and Russian cultural production from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, including on broad thematic topics such as Russian Visual and Literary Culture in the Age of Empire and on more narrowly focused subjects such as Kazimir Malevich and the Black Square. At Brown she offers courses on the history of Russian art and architecture; the aesthetics and politics of empire; the theory and history of the icon and its afterlives in literature, art, and film; medieval revivalism; the intersections between religion and modernity; and the practice and theory of the historical avant-garde.