Svetlana Alpers, born Svetlana Leontief (Cambridge, 1936), is an American art historian, daughter of Wassily Leontief. Specializing in sociology of art, she was a disciple of Ernst Gombrich at Harvard, where she earned a doctorate in 1965. In 1975 she was appointed Professor of Art History at the University of California, Berkeley. Alpers has developed a theory based on the representation of cultural languages and their gnoseological structure, relating various fields of cultural manifestation: art, science, religion, technique, poetry, together with social and semiotic aspects of culture.