Tamizdat Project Summer School (Tallinn, Estonia)

Deadline: April 1, 2024

You are cordially invited to join our Tamizdat Project Summer School 2024! In
partnership with Nemirovsky Summer School and Hunter College CUNY, this year
we plan to spend four weeks in Tallinn, Estonia, exploring the first
publications, circulation, and reception of banned books from the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe abroad during the Cold War. Please join us for this
exciting journey!

By enrolling in the program, you will able to take our special course
Tamizdat: Contraband Literature from the USSR and Eastern Europe through
Hunter College, sign up for Russian language courses offered by our hosts in
Tallinn, and listen to a variety of lecture courses by some of the most
prominent scholars and cultural figures from around the world! The program
also features field trips to Helsinki, Finland, and Riga, Latvia.

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CFP: “Defining Soviet Antisemitism: Everyday Jewish Experiences in the USSR”

Deadline: July 1, 2024

Call for Papers for an Edited Volume

Edited by Paula Chan (All Souls College, University of Oxford) and Irina Rebrova (Center for Research on Antisemitism, Technical University, Berlin)

Antisemitism was a thread that ran through the entire fabric of the Soviet Union. During the interwar period, Bolshevik ideology condemned the persecution of Jews as an evil relic of Imperial Russian rule. Meanwhile, Westerners as prominent as Henry Ford accused the USSR of being a Jewish institution, and Adolf Hitler’s opposition to “Judeo-Bolshevism” drove his vision for a new order in Europe. Upon the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, local antisemitism collided with hostility toward Stalin’s regime, with catastrophic consequences for Jews on Soviet territory. After the end of World War II, the USSR was the first country to recognize the state of Israel. Yet in the years that followed, Soviet leaders embraced discrimination against Jews like never before, even as they insisted that the USSR remained a bastion of anti-antisemitism. Scholars have grappled with the contradictions that surround antisemitism in the Soviet context in different ways. Events such as the prosecution of members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the Doctor’s Plot have loomed especially large, as have sweeping statements on Soviet responses to what we now call the Holocaust. Much of the literature tends to take Soviet antisemitism for granted – when the victim is Jewish, the repression is antisemitic. Intellectual siloing of Jewish, Soviet, and post-Soviet national studies perpetuate existing gaps in knowledge.

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Call for Applications: The FY 2024 Group Project Abroad Program Competition Is Now Open 

Deadline: March 18, 2024

The U.S. Department of Education, International and Foreign Language Education (IFLE), FY 2024 GPA program competition is now open. The deadline to apply is March 18, 2024.

Please visit Applicant Information — Fulbright-Hays–Group Projects Abroad Program for additional information about the competition.

Program Description

This program provides grants to support overseas projects in training, research, and curriculum development in modern foreign languages and area studies for teachers, students, and faculty engaged in a common endeavor. Projects may include short-term seminars, curriculum development, group research or study, or advanced intensive language programs.

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Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian Studies (University of Richmond)

Deadline: March 30, 2024

The Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Richmond invites applications for a full-time, one-year visiting assistant professor position in Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies (RSST), beginning in August 2024. This is a non-tenure track appointment, annually renewable for up to three years, contingent upon performance, budget, and continued need. We seek candidates with a strong commitment to high-quality undergraduate education who will also enhance the scholarly and creative opportunities provided by our program. The area of specialization is open; PhD required. The teaching load is 6 classes over two semesters.

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Multilingual Academic Corpus of Assignments for Russian Language Classrooms

MACAWS (Multilingual Academic Corpus of Assignments – Writing and Speech) is looking for teachers interested in implementing their corpus-based activities in their Russian language classrooms.

Eligible participants:* Are teaching Russian in 2024

* Are interested in implementing corpus-based activities, especially spoken corpus activities

* Are available for an introductory workshop prior to implementing activities

If you join our research, we are pleased to offer a $25 gift card to participating instructors and $5 gift cards to their students. If interested, please contact Shelley Staples (slstaples@arizona.edu) or Valentina Vinokurova (vvinokurova@arizona.edu) to learn more.

What is MACAWS?

MACAWS (Multilingual Academic Corpus of Assignments – Writing and Speech) is a corpus of learner texts from two foreign language programs, Portuguese and Russian, built at the University of Arizona. Currently, we have 1539 Russian texts (219,515 words), and our corpus is growing!

Where can I find MACAWS?

MACAWS can be accessed via an online interface. To view the corpus, you will need to request a login and password on the interface webpage free of charge.

How can I use MACAWS in my classroom?

MACAWS has a variety of applications in the classroom, such as:

  • noticing activities to help students recognize grammatical or lexical patterns
  • awareness raising to help students understand features of spoken Russian such as fillers, discourse markers, and active listening strategies
  • building confidence through exposure to authentic texts produced by other learners

For detailed information on how to use MACAWS in the classroom, please visit our website.

Study Abroad with American Councils

Deadline: March 15, 2024

Advanced Russian Language and Area Studies Program, currently offered at:  Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (KazNU) in Almaty, Kazakhstan

Yerevan State University in Yerevan, Armenia 

Balkan Language Initiative, which offers the following languages and locations:  Albanian in Tirana, Albania Bosnian in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina Bulgarian in Sofia, Bulgaria Serbian in Belgrade, Serbia

Montenegrin and Serbian in Podgorica, Montenegro

Eurasian Regional Language Program, offering 15 different languages at the sites below, including:  Kazakh in Almaty, Kazakhstan Azerbaijani and Turkish in Baku, Azerbaijan  Kyrgyz in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan Romanian and Ukrainian in Chisinau, Moldova Pashto, Persian (Dari/Farsi/Tajiki), and Uzbek in Dushanbe, Tajikistan Chechen, Georgian, and Ukrainian in Tbilisi, Georgia

Armenian and Kurmanji in Yerevan, Armenia

As always, please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions or queries at mshelton@americancouncils.org

CUNY REEES Workshop: “Marrying Sun Yat-senism and Turanism. Leveraging Ancestral Nationalism in Interwar Sino-Hungarian Cultural Diplomacy”

Event Date: March 22, 2024 | Online

Historian Mátyás Mervay, “Marrying Sun Yat-senism and Turanism. Leveraging Ancestral Nationalism in Interwar Sino-Hungarian Cultural Diplomacy,” on Friday, March 22nd at 12:30 pm via Zoom.

Zoom registration link: https://gc-cuny-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0pceGgqj4uHtDR04bjwgK-vncMtvAeEeZz#/registration

Papers for the workshops will be circulated one week prior to the event date and a reminder email will be sent at that time. We will meet once per month throughout the semester. March, April and May dates will be announced shortly. We look forward to seeing you!

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Call For Proposals: 2025 International Research Workshops (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Deadline: April 1, 2024

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies invites proposals from individuals and institutions to co-organize international research workshops in conjunction with the Mandel Center in 2025. Proposals are due Monday, April 1, 2024.

The Mandel Center’s Division of International Academic Programs promotes the vitality of research in the field of Holocaust studies around the world through the Moskowitz/Rafalowicz International Research Workshop and the Jacob and Yetta Gelman International Research Workshop. Our workshops seed research networks and produce new scholarship. We welcome proposals for workshop themes from scholars at universities and research institutions in all relevant disciplines, including (but not limited to) history, political science, literature, Jewish studies, Romani studies, philosophy, religion, anthropology, sociology, genocide studies, and law.

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SRAS Summer Language Programs

March 15, 2024

Application deadlines for the following early summer programs (end of May start) have been extended to March 15:

Batumi: Russian as a Second Language
Bishkek: Russian as a Second Language
Yerevan: Russian as a Second Language
Warsaw: Security and Society in the Information Age

The application deadline for all sessions starting after June 15 remain March 15. This includes the 6-week sessions for BatumiBishkek and Riga – in addition to the Ukrainian Language Workshop and Polish Language & Culture – both in Warsaw.

Conference: Moving Beyond The Center-Periphery Dynamics: Central and Eastern Europe From The Mid-19th Century to The Present

April 5-6, 2024 | University of Ottawa, Canada 

May 30-31, 2024 | University of Lille, France

Since the 18th century, the discourse on modernization—understood as a process aiming to align social organization with the expectations and needs of societies and carrying a promise of emancipation—identifies the Western form of modernity, in its political (democracy) and economic (capitalism) dimensions, as a model to follow. In the multicultural empires of Central and Eastern Europe, divergences in the paths and rhythms of political, economic, and social modernization engraved in collective imaginaries the idea of a structural delay of these societies compared to the rest of Europe, relegating them to the periphery—or semi-periphery—of the Western world (Ivan T. Berend). Since the works of Larry Wolf and Maria Todorova, this sort of intra-European orientalism has been deconstructed. Nevertheless, the discourse of structural delay in this part of Europe compared to the core of the western world has been influential in the Austrian, Russian, and Ottoman empires and in the countries that succeeded them, from the end of the First World War to today. This discourse justified structural reforms and enabled the rise of social groups interested in and useful for these reforms. It also fueled dissenting discourses and contributed to the production of alternative models, in a relationship of interdependence and exchange with countries situated in the core of the Western world (Claudia Kraft). This conference aims to examine the experience of Central and Eastern European countries with the modernization process from the late 18th century to the present, beyond the center-periphery dynamics.

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