Category: Calls for Papers (CFPs)

Deadline: August 15, 2021

Please consider submitting a paper proposal for the AATSEEL stream of panels entitled Neverending History: New Historical Cinema in Russia. The deadline for submissions is August 15 via AATSEEL website.

Neverending History: New Historical Cinema in Russia

The last ten years of Russian cinema were marked by a search for new ways of narrativizing Soviet history. The trend came to a head in the late 2010s-2020s, with a succession of contentious and widely discussed works: Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole (2019), Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dear Comrades (2020), and the most controversial of them all – Dau by Il’ya Khrzhanovsky (2019-20). Precariously balancing historical accuracy and aestheticism, the films’ desire to destabilize accepted historical narratives became embedded in their form as well as in the plots, sparking a conversation about the emergence of new historical cinema in Russia.

Continue reading “CFP: AATSEEL Stream: Neverending History: New Historical Cinema in Russia”

Deadline: August 15, 2021

Please consider submitting a paper proposal for the AATSEEL stream of panels on Russian Poetry and Poetics. The deadline for submissions is August 15 via AATSEEL website (please indicate interest in joining our stream when you submit  here). 

Russian Poetry and Poetics

Poetry has been a key genre in many different periods of Russian literature, from the first intentionally literary attempts in the eighteenth century to the Golden Age of Pushkin, from the modernist proliferation of the early twentieth century to today’s globally distributed Russophone poetry. This stream aims to bring together scholars working on poetry today, to showcase and share new approaches to a wide range of poetic material. It features two panels exploring different aspects of Russian poetry: first, issues of poetics and stylistics, such as versification, figures of speech, and imagery, so as to explore how these aspects contribute to convey a poem’s meaning. The second panel considers pre-nineteenth-century elements in twentieth- and twenty-first-century poems, rooting them in their cultural background and illuminating links between distinct literary epochs.

The stream welcomes papers that engage with these themes in order to think about the practice of Russian poetry in the different phases of its production—from the early modern, to the modern, to the contemporary.

Deadline: July 1; August 15, 2021

Diverse teaching approaches require different types of assessment. Many of us have been teaching online during the 2020-2021 academic year and have encountered multiple instances when our approaches to testing needed to be adjusted. We invite you to share your observations and teaching experiences from Slavic and East European classrooms at our roundtable.

Continue reading “CFP: AATSEEL Roundtable: Testing and Assessment”

Deadline: July 1; August 15, 2021

Due to the legacy of official Soviet literary policy, the intertextual presence of Western modernism in the writings of Russian authors, until recently, has been discussed as an exception rather than a systematic phenomenon. We would suggest that recent research is shifting this paradigm and that the exceptions that testify against the rule are too numerous not to explore in a more systematic way. In this stream of panels, we invite papers that look into influences, repulsions, translations, allusions, publishing histories, and other aspects of Russian authors’ engagement with modernist aesthetics in the ‘West’ (Anglo-American, German, French, Italian, Spanish, etc.). Papers may consider Russian literature of any period. We hope to put together three panels that can be arranged either according to a thematic or a chronological principle and that might address some of the following questions: Which representatives of Western modernism left a noticeable trace on Russian literature? In what way? How did the official Soviet, underground, or immigrant milieu shape Russian interaction with Western modernist works? How does post-perestroika Russian literature perceive Western modernism, and how has this shifted in recent years?

There are two possible deadlines for the submission, July 1 and August 15. The proposal should be submitted via the AATSEEL site.

Deadline: July 1; August 15, 2021

In light of the controversial events related to issues of policing and incarceration that we have witnessed in the past year in the U.S Eastern Europe and Russia this proposed stream aims to examine the field’s understanding and teaching of/in prisons. The powerful legacy of Russian and Eastern European authoritarian regimes and their historical practices of unjust detention imprisonment and exile also offer the opportunity to consider how the past inflects more recent conflicts between the state and its citizens and immigrants. Our panel will showcase new research on prison literature a category that includes but is not limited to fictional depictions of prison and labor camps autobiography memoirs and letters from a range of eras. Our roundtable will address approaches to teaching prison literature and academics teaching literature in prisons a growing practice in general and within Slavic Studies in particular. Operating on the principle that prisons are institutions which are intricately tied to society despite their fortified walls obscuring what happens therein this stream seeks to illuminate an array of carceral states understood both as governmental biopolitical regimes of punishment and control and the experiences of captivity and coercion.

AATSEEL’s two deadlines are July 1 and August 15. If you are interested in joining our stream, please be sure to indicate this intention when submitting a paper or roundtable proposal here.

Deadline: August 15, 2021

Soliciting papers for the panel stream on Uneven and Combined Development for the upcoming AATSEEL conference. Deadline for abstracts is August 15th (please indicate interest in joining our stream when you submit here.)

Here is the description for the stream: The theory of Uneven and Combined Development(UCD) was famously formulated by Lev Trotsky to explain the Russian Revolutions of 1917. More broadly, UCD has reemerged in recent years as both a theoretical problem and a scholarly methodology in fields such as history and international relations. This stream is interested in UCD as a concept in cultural analysis. If, as some have argued, Pyotr Chaadaev’s diagnosis of Russia’s unique position with respect to world culture anticipates the idea of UCD, then how can UCD help locate the particularity of Slavic and East European cultures through their historical development, rather than a timeless essence? How does UCD give shape to specific cultural (artistic, literary, cinematic, etc.) forms, whether of specific works or genres and national traditions? In turn, how might cultural production give form to the experience of UCD? How might UCD allow fora reframing of familiar tropes like cultural “belatedness”? What kinds of “unevenness” or multiple zones can be observed within our region’s engagement with the rest of the world (for example, the non-aligned movement during the Cold War alongside Soviet involvement in anti-colonial movements)? How does UCD shed light on dynamics of translation and reception of imported cultural forms? We invite abstracts dealing with any period and area of REEES considered through the lens of UCD. We are also open to related fields of inquiry such as Ernst Bloch’s “non-synchronicity”, World-Systems Theory, and Dependency Theory.