Deadline for Submissions: February 20, 2017

SECOND ANNUAL TARTU CONFERENCE
ON RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES

The Russian Revolution and Its Legacies: Taking Stock a Century Later
4-6 June 2017, Tartu, Estonia

Scholars working in all subfields of area studies, including comparative politics, international relations, economics, history, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and related disciplines, are invited to submit proposals for panels, roundtables and papers for the Second Tartu Conference on Russian and East European Studies.

The Tartu Conference is a venue for academic discussion of the fundamental cultural, social, economic and political trends affecting all aspects of people’s life in Russia and Eastern Europe. The First Tartu Conference, held in June 2016, brought together more than 200 scholars from across multiple disciplines, from the region and beyond.

Participants of the 2017 conference are invited to share their reflections on the Russian revolution of 1917 and the ensuing developments in Russia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the world. How are they represented and interpreted today by professional historians, various political actors and the wider public? What was their impact on culture, the economy, political systems, ideologies and social structures? Which legacies and path-dependencies going back to 1917 continue to be relevant today for memory politics, value systems, social institutions, the economy and international relations? What does an analysis of 1917 and its legacies contribute to the comparative study of revolutions? How can the liberating potential of popular struggles against exploitation and oppression be harnessed, and can social orders be transformed without resorting to violence? How do we keep alive the memory of the victims of twentieth-century totalitarianism and defend democracy against mounting challenges? Continue reading “CFP: “The Russian Revolution and Its Legacies: Taking Stock a Century Later” (Tartu, Estonia)”

Deadline for Submissions: March 01, 2017

CALL FOR PAPERS
for Studies in Slavic Cultures XIV
Late Socialism: Second-World Modernity in Global Circulation

This volume of Studies in Slavic Cultures invites contributions that explore the culture of Late Socialism from a transnational perspective. Taken to be the period from the death of Stalin to the beginning of Perestroika (mid-1950s to the mid-1980s), Late Socialism is not merely a transitionary phase between a totalitarian regime and the liberalizations of impending collapse. Rather, it is a period with rich potential to explore the particularity and comparability of second-world modernity in a cross-cultural framework.

This period is marked by increasing international contacts and cross-cultural transfers not only with the Western world, but also with the cultures and subcultures of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Scholarship on Russo-Soviet culture often oscillates between two overreaching claims. On the one hand, some Slavists interpret Russo-Soviet culture, history, and politics as sui generis, invoking a long tradition of an exceptionalist Russia, as “neither East nor West.” On the other hand, a competing tendency has insisted upon a comparitivist Russia, one in which Russia belongs to the same temporal-spatial modernity as Europe, yet inevitably therefore “backward” on a shared scale of cultural development.

Taking insight from Michael David-Fox’s Crossing Borders, which convincingly deconstructs this binary opposition in favor of an alternative lens “marked by webs of meaning, multicausal explanations, and pluralistic rather than exclusionary interpretive frameworks,” we invite articles that examine the particularities of Late Socialist culture, putting them into diverse geopolitical and cross-cultural constellations. Continue reading “CFP: “Late Socialism: Second-World Modernity in Global Circulation” (U. of Pittsburgh)”

Deadline for Submissions: March 10, 2017

Deadline for Submissions: February 10, 2017

“MODERNIZATIONS”
4th Annual Polish Studies Conference at the University of Illinois at Chicago
April 24-25, 2017

 Organizers: Professor Michał Paweł Markowski (Hejna Family Chair in Polish Language and Literature) & Professor Keely Stauter-Halsted (Hejna Family Chair in the History of Poland)

Poland has long been the focus of modernization theories, schemes, and projects. From Enlightenment travelers critiquing the Polish lands for their backwardness and incivility to communist ideologues intent on the revolutionary transformation of society, Poles have been engaged in conversations about modernization for most of the past two centuries.

Modernization—the notion of a transformation from a traditional, rural, agrarian society to a secular, urban, and industrial one—has recently experienced a decline in reputation. Until 1918 modernization programs helped move the nation forward while the political existence of the state was denied, often pitting intellectual and economic agendas against nationalist ideologies supported by the Church. After independence, modernization goals drove the Second Republic to fight decades of underdevelopment in order to keep pace with liberal democracies across Europe. Later, modernization became a buzzword for the Communists, justifying grandiose social engineering projects. More recently, the integration of Poland and the Poles into the European Union has brought economic benefit, but social dislocation and insecurity, providing fodder for debates about the value of modernization. In all of these cases, modernization has been skillfully manipulated as an ideological weapon in battles over power, influence, and the control of public opinion. The massive political turnout and populist movements currently taking power worldwide suggest a reversal in the way ideas of modernization have resonated. In Poland, some have suggested that the rise of the Law and Justice party in 2015 came about through the Party’s explicit resistance to modernization, especially as it had been employed in Civic Platform’s neoliberal economic programs.

What have all these versions of modernization meant to Poland and to Poles? How can we as scholars understand the ways modernization schemes have affected Polish society? The centrality of modernization tropes in Modern Polish history demands careful investigation. We invite proposals for presentations to consider different accounts of how modernization has been used in the last 150 years and to look closer at how its enthusiasts and its detractors continue fighting one another, even while claiming to share a concern for a better future of the Polish nation.  Continue reading “CFP: Fourth Annual Polish Studies Conference (Chicago, Illinois)”

Deadline for Submissions: February 13, 2017

Continue reading “CFP: New Directions in Anthropology Conference (UT-Austin)”

Deadline for Submissions: February 15, 2017

CFP: University of Virginia Slavic Forum (Mar. 31- Apr. 1)

“RE:Constructions: An Interdisciplinary Forum on Memory and Imagination”

Keynote Speaker: Masha Gessen, Friday, March 31st

Traditional applications of the terms memory and imagination have emphasized a distinct barrier between the concepts based on the premise of accuracy. Memory should be a record, one that, if occasionally faulty, remains primarily truthful. Imagination cannot be faulty because it is nebulous, fictive, unconcerned with veracity. However, in recent years, cognitive scientists have demonstrated that the same neural processes underlie both memory and imagination. Memories are as much constructs as imagination.

This forum is devoted to the intersections of memory and imagination in constructing identity, history, traditions, and futures. Memory invokes ideas of nostalgia, trauma, the urge to preserve, to delay oblivion. Imagination invokes dreaming, invention, childhood, play. Despite the seeming differences between the two, they both affect every sphere of human experience and endeavor. Continue reading “CFP: “RE:Constructions: An Interdisciplinary Forum on Memory and Imagination” (U. of Virginia)”

Deadline for Submissions: February 28, 2017

“Privacy” is a well-researched yet highly disputed concept in Western scholarship. While most privacy research comes from and concentrates on Western liberal societies, great potential of privacy studies beyond this traditional framework still remains largely unexplored. The framework of Western liberal societies may therefore be seen not only as a “comfort zone” of privacy studies, but also as a barrier that often limits the potential of the research. This conference aims at elucidating the problems and the perspectives of privacy studies beyond the traditional liberal framework by bringing together scholars and PhD students who work on the concept of “privacy” in the context of Late Socialist Eastern and East-Central Europe.
A common challenge to privacy researchers of non-Western societies, especially if they come from such a society, is to refute the erroneous misconception of the absence of “privacy” in non-liberal societies, and to embrace the constructions of “privacy” that these local societies offer. This conference endeavors to create a dialogue between scholars and PhD students from all fields of humanities and social and political sciences to discuss the challenges of transgressing the borders of liberal frameworks, the strategies to cope with these challenges, and the perspectives for privacy research that such transgressions offer.

The use of this concept in the context of Late Socialist Eastern and East-Central Europe leads to a range of questions that challenge liberal dichotomies and pave the way for alternative visions of “privacy”. These questions are particularly resonant now, in the centennial year of the October Revolution, when its consequences are debated anew. While the liberal concept of “privacy” usually fails in the framework of authoritarian regimes of post-war Europe, the region offers a diversity of other impulses similar to the liberal idea of “privacy”. In the post-war years, Socialist Eastern and East-Central Europe witnessed the expansion of the material as well as immaterial private sphere, which did not only come as a result of the changed world order and subsequent transformations of Socialist societies, but can also be seen as a process that was meticulously planned, carried out, and controlled by the authorities of respective countries in an attempt to stabilize their regimes in the process of de-Stalinization. However, we should also consider whether the private sphere, so benevolently tolerated by Socialist states, continuously developed into an enfant terrible that nurtured not only stability, but also the disruptive forces of dissidence and civil rights movements, which ultimately undermined the Socialist bloc from within. These stabilizing and simultaneously disruptive currents of “privacy” within non-liberal societies are of particular interest, as they elucidate the multifaceted nature of this concept.

Participants are therefore asked to revisit and question the concept of “privacy” in liberal contexts as well as within the frameworks of Late Socialist Eastern and East-Central Europe by renegotiating the underlying categories within a certain society. The conference will specifically examine ways of addressing the concepts of “privacy” and “publicity” in said contexts by debating the applicable frameworks and by challenging existing approaches. It will further explore the potential of “reverse applicability” by discussing how privacy research in liberal contexts can benefit from other frameworks of privacy—the transfer that is of particular interest now, in the “post-privacy age”, when Snowden’s revelations elucidated the approximations of Western liberal states to the authoritarian models of the past and the present. In the light of such developments, the examination of Late Socialist authoritarian societies becomes advantageous for our understanding of contemporary privacy paradigms. Continue reading “CFP: “Privacy Outside Its ‘Comfort Zone’: Late Socialist Eastern and East-Central Europe between the Private and the Public” (U. of Passau)”

Deadline for Proposals: April 01, 2017

CALL FOR PAPERS
Accelerated development? Socio-political landslides, cultural ruptures and literary history in Eastern Europe (Ghent University, Ghent, September 29 – October 1, 2017)

In 1964 the Bulgarian-Belarusian-Russian scholar Georgii Gachev coined the term ‘uskorennoe razvitie’ or ‘accelerated development’ in his 1964 monograph Accelerated Development of Literature: On the Basis of the Bulgarian Literature of the First Half of the 19th Century.  The term describes what happened to Bulgarian literature during Ottoman rule. Being a ‘young’ and ‘peripheral’ literature, having started to develop only recently at the time, Bulgarian literature ‘had to’ go through the whole evolution of European literature at a high pace in order to catch up with the latter. One of the side effects of this accelerated development was that characteristics of different style periods could even co-occur. Gachev’s thought-provoking idea has never really received a lot of attention, except in Bulgarian studies, where the concept was elaborated, criticized and / or gave way to new theories (Petar Dinekov, Nikolai Genchev, Roumen Daskalov, Alexander Kiossev …), but mostly with regard to the development of Bulgarian culture and society.

Today Gachev’s theory seems outdated, not in the least for its centralist assumptions – i.e. taking for granted that central cultures take the lead and peripheral cultures follow suit – that form the very basis of the Eurocentric theory. Nonetheless, the potential of the very kernel of the concept is obvious – both for dealing with the literary histories of other ‘young’ and/or ‘peripheral’ literatures in different time periods and for challenging the different notions that form the basis of Gachev’s theory – ‘peripheral’, ‘young’, ‘Western’, ‘dominant’, ‘oppression’, ‘conservatism’. ‘Accelerated development’ may be a suitable term to describe how Western literary critics in the 19th century thought about the quickly evolving, ‘peripheral’ Russian literature of the time. ‘Accelerated development’ may also be applied to the evolution of (certain) Modernist movements in the ‘peripheral’ Eastern Europe. And what to say about the apparent fast-forward evolution of the East-European literatures after the collapse of Communism, quickly adapting Postmodernism, Magical Realism, and other literary trends that other, ‘central’ literatures had been going through earlier? Continue reading “CFP: Accelerated development? Socio-political landslides, cultural ruptures and literary history in Eastern Europe (Ghent U.)”