Speakers Spring 2013
Content
January
24 January - New Directions in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia
Individual Lives and the Culture of International Communism
4pm,
101 International Studies Building, 910 S Fifth St Champaign
Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is a professor of history at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of two books: 'Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932 (2001)' and 'The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (2006).' Her current research explores the personal and political lives of international communists.
Cosponsored by:
Center for Global Studies
Department of History
February
21 February - New Directions in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia
Divided Historical Memory among Youth in Estonia: Sources of Ideational Cleavage
4pm, 101 International Studies Building, 910 S Fifth St, Champaign
Ted Gerber is Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of California-Berkeley. Gerber's research examines socio-economic stratification, demographic processes, education, labor markets, public opinion, and social change in contemporary Russia and other former Soviet republics. He has authored or co-authored 47 published articles, which have appeared in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Annual Review of Sociology, Social Forces, Foreign Affairs, International Security, Sociology of Education, other scholarly journals, and several edited volumes. He has implemented 25 large-sample surveys in the region, and also conducted numerous focus group and interview-based studies. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Education, and the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research.
March
5 March - Millercomm lecture series
Brotherlands: A Family History of the European Nations
4pm, TBA
Timothy Snyder received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1997, where he was a British Marshall Scholar. Before joining the faculty at Yale in 2001, he held fellowships in Paris and Vienna, and an Academy Scholarship at Harvard. He is the author of five award-winning books, including: Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (Harvard Press, 1998); The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (Yale Press, 2003); Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (Yale Press, 2005); The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of A Habsburg Archduke (Basic Books, 2008).
In 2010 he published Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, a history of Nazi and Soviet mass killing on the lands between Berlin and Moscow. It has received a number of honors, including the Leipzig Prize for European Understanding and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award in the Humanities. It was named a book of the year by some dozen publications, has been translated into more than twenty languages, and was a bestseller in four countries. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in modern East European political history. In 2012-2013 he will teach History 263-264, "Eastern Europe to 1914" and "Eastern Europe Since 1914," as well as graduate seminars on the Holocaust and on east European history as global history. Click here for a list of reviews and links.
7 march - new directions in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia
Legal Histories in Eastern Europe New Foci, Methods and Approaches
4pm, 101 International Studies Building, 910 S Fifth St, Champaign
Yvonne Kleinmann's current work as head of the research group 'Pathways of Law in Ethno-Religiously Mixed Societies: Resources of Experience in Poland-Lithuania and Its Successor States' at Leipzig University has been ongoing since 2008. She holds masters degrees in the fields of East European History, Slavic Studies, and Theatre Studies. Earlier on in her career she participated in the preparation of the permanent exhibition of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, worked at the Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture in Leipzig, and coordinated the project 'Peace of Religions and Modes of Solving Religious Conflicts in East Central Europe' at the GWZO in Leipzig. Her Ph.D. thesis on Jewish forms of life in St. Petersburg and Moscow in the 19th century was published in 2006.
12 march - Noontime Scholar lecture
Resistance, Rescue, Reproductive Labor: Jewish 'family units' and the Nazi genocide
12pm, 101 International Studies Building, 910 S Fifth St, Champaign
'Family units' within or alongside the Soviet partisan movement were sites of survival for thousands of ghetto refugees in Nazi-occupied Belorussia. Oral histories and archival records of the partisan movement illuminate the organization of these units and point to internal conflicts within the movements that are related to antisemitism, sexism, and their intersection.
Part of a larger project on the experiences and memories of elderly Jews in the former Soviet Union, this talk attends to forms of resistance and rescue in a context of extreme violence. The paper argues that reproductive labor, the provision of shelter, food, and care, was central to securing survival for Jewish and non-Jewish civilians and partisans. Because of is traditionally marginalized position in favor of male-defined militarism and heroism, this labor was largely omitted in postwar portrayals of war and genocide in the Soviet Union and beyond, pushing its agents to the margins of commemoration and scholarship on Jewish resistance.
Anika Walke is a Postdoctoral Fellow in International and Area Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she directs the project 'Migration, Identity, State.' She is currently completing a book manuscript, Jewish Youth in Ghettos and Forests: Oral Histories of the Nazi Genocide in Belorussia. She has published articles and book chapters on conducting oral history research in post-Soviet society. Current research interests include questions of memory and migration in the former Soviet Union and Europe, and histories of racism and anti-racism in the Soviet Union.
26 March - Noontime Scholar Lecture
Polish, Jewish, Queer: The Hybridities of Julian Stryjkowski
12pm, 101 International Studies Building, 910 S Fifth St, Champaign
Jack Hutchens works on the intersection of gender and national identity in Poland, examining writers and texts that challenge heteronormative and ethnically homogeneous conceptions of Polish identity. His dissertation project, for which he won a prestigious ACLS grant, is entitled “Transgressions: Queer Discourse and National and Gender Identities in Twentieth-Century Polish Fiction.” His current research interests include Modern Polish and Czech Literature, Queer Theory, and Popular Culture.
April
9 april - Noontime Scholar lecture
Educational Opportunities for Physically Handicapped Students in Post-Soviet Russia
12pm, 101 International Studies Building, 910 S Fifth St, Champaign
Nellie Manis is in her last year as an MA REEEC student at Illinois. She is interested in Russian, East European, and Eurasian sociology and law, with a particular interest in the minority experience and the rights of under-served communities. She received a BA in History and a BA in International Studies from Penn State University in 2008. After completing her MA in 2013, she hopes to pursue a career in the international sphere while continuing to study Russian, French, and Ukrainian.
11 April - new directions in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia
Russia's Cold War Generation and the End of the Soviet Dream: Soviet Baby Boomers Talk about Their Lives
4pm, 101 International Studies Building, 910 S Fifth St, Champaign
Donald J. Raleigh received his Ph.D. at Indiana University and has taught at the University of Hawaii and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His publications include Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov (Cornell University Press, 1986); Experiencing Russia's Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917‐1922 (Princeton University Press, 2002); and Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia's Cold War Generation (Oxford University Press, 2012).
16 April - Noontime Scholar lecture
Science Against Injustice: Literary Investigation of Bogoraz’s “Silhouettes from Gomel”
12pm, 101 International Studies Building, 910 S Fifth St, Champaign
Nadja Berkovich is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She has taught Russian classes from the elementary through third-year levels and first year Yiddish. She is working on her dissertation, entitled “The Emergence of Literary Ethnography in the Russian Empire: From the Far East to the Pale of Settlement, 1845-1917.” In it, she explores the genre of literary ethnography, the intersection of ethnography and fiction, including discursive practices and narrative strategies, the analysis of the different peoples of the Russian Empire, and its use of diverse genres (tsarist documents, newspapers, sketches, diaries, short stories, and plays) by focusing on one Russian and three Jewish populists: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Semyon An-sky, Lev Shternberg, and Vladimir Bogoraz.
18 april - new directions in russia, eastern europe, and eurasia
Innovation Development in Ukraine: Situation and Options for Political Actions
4pm, 101 International Studies Building, 910 S Fifth St, Champaign
Yuriy Kapitsa obtained a Master's Degree in law from the Kyiv State University named for Taras Shevchenko and a Doctorate of Sciences in Law from the Institute of State and Law of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1977 Kapitsa became the Director of the Centre of Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. There he conducts research on comparative intellectual property law, IPR enforcement, and international/ internal transfer of technology. In addition to his work at the Centre, Kapitsa served as the director of the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine project from 2003-2006. The project focused on the approximation of intellectual property legislation of Ukraine to that of the EU. During this time he co-authored a number of law acts and regulations in IPR domain.
Kapitsa conducted research on intellectual property enforcement, combating piracy, and the transfer of technologies at several prestigeous insititutions including: Oxford University, Great Britain (2007); Stanford University, USA (2001,2002), and London University, Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College (1997). As an international expert he participated in various EU technical assistance projects, dealing with approximation of national legislation to EU and WTO intellectual property standards, IPR enforcement, innovation development, WTO Trade Policy and Law Course.
23 April - Noontimes Lecture Series
Black Pearl. Russian postmodernism in the context of creativity/entropy
12pm, 101 International Studies Building, 910 S Fifth St, Champaign
Traditional notions of Russian postmodernism as an extreme cultural-aesthetic phenomenon miss the important qualities of heterogeneity it exhibits. The avant-garde is just one of its strands. In this talk Spivakovsky will look at Russian postmodernist literature and art with reference to the energy/entropy binary formulated by Yevgeny Zamyatin and examine its recent shift from the conceits of the avant-garde to a greater depth of perception and an acknowledgment of the tragic nature of contemporary existence.
Spivakovsky is an Associate Professor in the Department of Twentieth Century Russian Literature (Philological Faculty) at Moscow State University. He is also a Visiting Associate Professor of the Russian, East European & Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois. His research interests include Russian Postmodernism, polyphony in the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and the work of Vladimir Sorokin's poetics. He is especially interested in Sorokin's poetics in terms of its ethics, views on citizenship, as well as the problem of overcoming the consequences of totalitarian thought and pre-modern stereotypes in the works of Russian postmodernists. Currently, his research focuses on the emergence of a new version of postmodernism in the context of the newest Russian reality. He is the author of the monograph: Fenomen A.I. Solzhenitsyna: novyi vzgliad / INION RAN. Moscow, 1998 and 60 scientific articles about Russian literature and culture of the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries. He also compiled and prefaced a book entitled: "Ivanu Denisovichu" polveka: Iubileinyi sbornik (1962'2012) . Moscow.: House of Russian emigre named Solzhenitsyn: Russkii put', 2012.
25 April - New Directions in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia
Olesha's Sucide Machine in the Context of Late Russian Avant-Garde
4pm, 101 International Studies Building, 910 S Fifth St, Champaign
Julia Vaingurt is an Associate Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her book, Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press.