Category: Conferences/Seminars

Deadline: (extended) February 21, 2020

Call for Papers
The University of Virginia Slavic Society of Graduate Students is delighted to
announce a call for proposals for its 11th annual Slavic Forum. The conference will
take place March 20-21, 2020 in Charlottesville, Virginia and will feature scholar
and professor Myroslav Shkandrij from the University of Manitoba as keynote
speaker. 
A reception will be followed by a day of presentations and discussion.
This call for papers aims for a broad range of proposals from undergraduate,
graduate, faculty, and independent levels of junior and advanced scholars in the
Humanities and Social Sciences and with a focus on contexts inside or outside
the Russian-speaking world.

“Hindsight (Is 2020)”
Hindsight is an inescapable element of the human experience, but defining it
leads to its own world of questions: is it knowledge? or is it the process and its
forces that change our present and future? What relationships do people have
with the past? Individuals, groups, and states have long faced these quandaries;
now, is humanity as a whole capable of hindsight in the information age? If so,
what can we hope to get out of hindsight in our future?
At the 2020 Slavic Forum “Hindsight (is 2020)” these questions and more are open
to investigation and comment. Some possible topics for presentation include:

• Literature: nostalgia, historical revisionism, anniversaries and centennials, memory, confusion, recollection and reflection, second chances, mistakes and clarification, heritage. 
• Linguistics: evolutionary linguistics, etymology, semantic change, linguistic shift, computational research. 
• Cultural and social studies: tradition, ritual, disaster, adaptation, power, reform, revolution. 

The deadline for proposals is February 21, 2020. Please send proposals with full
contact information to uvaslavicforum@gmail.com as a one-page PDF document
containing a presentation title, keywords, and an abstract (150-300 words). An
explanation of the paper topic’s relation to the general theme is welcome, but not
required. Travel grant applications will be made available to applicants after submitting their materials. 
The annual UVa Slavic Forum is sponsored this year by the UVa Department of
Slavic Languages and Literatures; the Center for Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies; and the Graduate Council. 

Deadline: (Extended) February 23, 2020

Date: May 6-8, 2020 https://www.overindulgenceconference.com 
Location: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University Keynote speaker: Eric Naiman (UC Berkeley) 

Transgression against societal norms has long been elevated to transgression against the divine. Yet vice and virtue are not always mutually incompatible; morals and societal norms are not always black and white. Nor is transgression the only way to move from virtue to sin (or vice versa). In Crime and Punishment, it is Sonia who becomes Dostoevsky’s guiding star to redemption – despite her “fall from grace” into prostitution. (Over) Indulgence aims at exploring such virtuous acts of sin; our graduate conference is interested in tracing various entanglements of the virtuous and the sinful across the Eastern European and Eurasian landscape. 

Deadline: February 18, 2020

Migration is a constant feature of the current age of ‘liquid modernity’, transforming societies into a collection of diasporas(Bauman). Research in Russian speaking mobility offers a valuable contribution to both the theoretical and empirical aspects of migration and mobility studies. While Russian speakers have crossed state boundaries for centuries, the collapse of the Soviet Union has created an unprecedented environment for mobility and diasporic processes of Russophones, destabilising hegemonic relations between the centre and the periphery and producing emerging conditions including ‘beached diasporas’, ‘Global Russians’, ‘virtual Russophonia’, and ‘transnational Russian cultures’, to name but a  few. Currently, the geography of Russian-speaking communities outside Russia is wider than ever with the overall population comparable in  size to that of the Russian Federation. Discourse perspectives have recently marked a theoretical shift in migration research. Mobility is intrinsically discursive as space, communities,identities and belonging are constructed in narratives-those produced by migrants and those about migrants. What do these stories –written and oral, visual and multimodal, fictional and real –tell us about Russian-speaking movers across the world? As the Russian speakers populate the ‘third space’ (Bhabha) of diasporic sites, and as these sites turn to the ‘zones of  intense  cutting-edge  creativity’(Karim),  what  are  the  discursive  manifestations and articulations of this condition? And how do the current migration narratives of Russophones compare with those produced in other ‘waves’ of migration from Russia and the Soviet Union?