Category: Conferences/Seminars

Deadline:  January 20, 2021

The goal of this edited collection is to bring together the work of scholars working on Soviet and Russian animation from a transcultural or global perspective. We are interested in a variety of cross-cultural encounters between Soviet and Russian animators and their Western counterparts. Our timeline includes any Soviet cartoons produced between the October Revolution and the fall of the U.S.S.R. as well as their afterlives in the present.  Our aim is to show the complex ways that Soviet/Russian animation industry interacted with the West, broadly defined, and how this interaction changed after 1991.

Deadline: December 20, 2020

A Critical Discussion Forum proposal for the Slavic Review [SEE REVISED DEADLINES]

The Working Group for Solidarity in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, an ASEEES affiliate group, and the Slavic Review are soliciting submissions for a Critical Discussion Forum on the state of the field and the specific challenges of contingency. Slavic Review will host the forum tentatively titled Crisis, Contingency, and the Future of REEES: Perspectives on the Present and Future of the Field, to be published approximately in the Fall 2021. Contributions to this forum will focus on challenges our field faces, both in confronting the current COVID-19 crisis and grappling with long-lasting structural problems in our field, such as racism, xenophobia, sexism, classism, homo- and transphobia; discrimination based on nationality, ethnicity, and religious affiliation; as well as the lack of employment, housing, and healthcare security.

Deadline: January 15, 2021

We invite proposals for a special issue of Russian Literature dedicated to Cultural Biopolitics in Modern Russia.

The term “biopolitics” was coined by Michel Foucault to describe a historical shift that took place in the 17th and 18th centuries, when an earlier concept of sovereignty, grounded in the power to decide when “to take life or let live,” was replaced by one determined by the state’s power “to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.” With the emergence of liberal democracy and modern capitalism, new forms of governmentality appeared that centered on the administration of bodies at the level of the population. From government funded programs to increase birth rates to prohibitions on smoking, euthanasia, and certain kinds of sexual behavior, natural life began to be included in the calculations of the state. Sovereign power increasingly became identified with the management of life. Politics assumed the form of biopolitics.

Deadline: February 1, 2021

“During the war people avidly read Tolstoy’s War and Peace as a means of testing their reactions.” So begins Lydia Ginzburg’s The Siege of Leningrad: Notes of a Survivor. Now that the very fiber of our social life has been upended by the pandemic, whose reverberations will be undoubtedly with us for many years to come, the journal Russian Literature proposes to again turn to books for insights on our common predicament. In the Petersburg of Osip Mandelstam’s The Egyptian Stamp, library books “are inhabited by measles, scarlatina, and chicken pox.” Indeed, classics of Russian and East European literature are swarming with infection and more often than not contagion mixes with political conflagration in their fevered collective consciousness. And, even before the era of Covid-19, contemporary literature and film became infested with scenarios in which viruses, both biological and digital, are unleashed, either intentionally or accidentally, by either the West or the East upon the world with catastrophic consequences.

Deadline: December 23, 2020

Editors: Liudmila Klimanova (University of Arizona), Jason Merrill (Michigan State University/Middlebury College Kathryn Wasserman Davis School of Russian), Shannon Donnally Spasova (Michigan State University).

The sudden global outbreak of COVID-19 in late 2019 has led to an abrupt transition of Russian and Slavic programs to emergency remote, hyflex, and synchronous online modalities as a then-thought-to-be temporary alternative to face-to-face and hybrid instruction delivery modes. The transition disrupted established educational practices and put unprecedented pressures on administrators, program directors, instructors, graduate teaching assistants, and students. While online instruction traditionally offers a great deal of flexibility in teaching and learning, the speed with which this move to remote teaching took place was staggering, and the need to continue with remote teaching beyond one interrupted term was unexpected. In addition to administrative and emotional challenges, and a severe lack of technical and methodological support associated with this transition, faculty and instructors in university programs found themselves unprepared to lead interactive classes in a video conferencing environment, to design suitable digital materials and evaluation instruments for remote teaching modalities, or to develop new pedagogies of remote language teaching for regular and immersive programs, often having to improvise quick solutions in less-than-ideal circumstances.