Author: Josh

Deadline: August 15, 2023

“Per Aspera ad Astra: The Making of Soviet Jewish Selves”

October 5th, 2023, Columbia University, New York

In his new book How the Soviet Jew Was Made, Prof. Sasha Senderovich (University of Washington) examines Soviet Jewishness through a series of literary and artistic representations. On October 5th, 2023, the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, the Harriman Institute, and the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University will co-host a one-day graduate conference that is inspired and informed by Senderovich’s book. This conference will examine, from a range of disciplinary perspectives, the implicit question of the title: How, indeed, was the Soviet Jew made?

We encourage interested participants to address the construction of Soviet Jewishness from a variety of scholarly perspectives, including, but not limited to: literary studies, history, anthropology, film studies, social studies, and visual and plastic arts. The
conference does not seek to replicate a traditional panel of research papers, but rather aims to interrogate, collaboratively, topics such as: 

• Transnationalism 
• Multilingualism and Translation 
• Marginality / Liminality 
• Ambivalence
• Transit and Mobility 
• Borders and Adversity

Deadline: September 30, 2023

Call for Papers: Teaching the Languages of Central and Eastern Europe: Adapting to the Post-Pandemic World 

NeMLA 2024 panel (March 7-10, 2024, Boston, MA) 

This panel is looking for presentations about innovations that college instructors of Central and Eastern European languages have been implementing in order to make language and culture courses relevant and meaningful in the era of post-Covid and the war in Ukraine. How has the pandemic changed our methodology and pedagogy? What approaches and techniques do we take with us? What practices do we discard? In what areas do we innovate and what are successful innovations? How do we adapt to different student expectations and experiences in face-to-face, remote or hybrid courses? What has the pandemic made obsolete, a “surplus”, in our courses? How has the war in Ukraine influenced our curriculum? 

Abstracts focusing on any less commonly taught language that is spoken in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc will be considered, including but not limited to: Albanian, Bosnian / Croatian / Montenegrin / Serbian, Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Romani, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian. 

Deadline: October 1, 2023

An interdisciplinary conference sponsored by the journal Kritika and the Harriman Institute of Columbia University, to be held at the Harriman Institute in New York City on April 19-20, 2024.

The conference Eurasia Decentered builds upon recent scholarship that casts the differences between the internal souths of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, on the one hand, and the external souths of India, Persia, China, the Ottoman Empire / Turkey, Latin America, and elsewhere, on the other, as both blurred and critical. Kritika editors are soliciting analyses that show the symbiotic nature of north-south relations through economic exchange, political modeling and rivalry, migration, and cultural forms. We seek to highlight the ways the north was transformed by its contacts with the tricontinental south. We intend for the conference to be multi-perspectival across space and time. For instance, how was the Russian Empire perceived from Tehran in 1829 or the Soviet Union from New Delhi in 1946? How did the Soviet Union theorize the existence of its internal south, which was sometimes imagined in racial terms, amid its support for anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia? We invite the consideration of experts in the histories of the medieval East Slavic states, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union, as well as scholars of the external south who engage these topics “from the other shore.”

Kritika editors are drawn to this topic by two related developments in the field of Imperial Russian and Soviet history. The first is the growing prominence of comparative, transnational, and trans-imperial approaches, which have situated histories of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union amid the global circulation of ideas, practices, peoples, and commodities. It bears emphasizing that transnational and comparative thinking and, more broadly, efforts to de-exoticize Russia and the Soviet Union have been part of Kritika’s agenda from its very first issue.

Deadline: August 31, 2023

Institute of Slovak Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, PRI, kindly invites you to attend the conference Body and Embodiment in Slovak Poetry held on 26 September 2023 at the Institute of Slovak Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dúbravská cesta 9, Bratislava, Slovakia.

In her The Forms of the Affects (2014), Eugenie Brinkema draws a line from Spinoza to nineteenth- and twentieth- century philosophical trends to show how the body, “[l]ike the needling of gray lard through a slab of lean” (Brinkema 2014: 123), was reinserted into the centre of European theory and philosophy. In this line of thinking, the body is not thought of as a metaphysical concept, but as a body in its materiality, including its “rotting odors, viscous substances, and dark, damp regions” (ibid.). To distinguish the metaphysical concept from the reality of messy, visceral bodies, research in this direction employs the notion of embodiment to signal that it does not wish to address the body “as part of our ‘animal’ nature or, in accordance with a Cartesian approach […] as a physical mechanism” (Weiss and Fern Haber 2014: xiii). The emphasis on bodily experience has been embraced by such areas of critical inquiry as feminism, gender and queer studies, critical race theory, or disability studies and corporeality of human experience has also been explored within literary studies. An exciting prism for the interaction with literary phenomena has also been presented by crip theory which links disability studies to queer theory.

Deadline: July 1, 2023

The American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) would like to remind colleagues about the Call for Papers for the 2024 conference in Las Vegas, which is available here:

http://www.aatseel.org/cfp_main

In addition to regular conference panels and events, the program also includes panel streams. The streams promote greater cohesion among conference panels and foster a broader dialogue throughout the conference. The result is a series of mini-conferences within the framework of our larger conference.  All conference attendees are welcome to attend stream panels, but participants in a stream are expected to attend all of the panels in their stream.