Category: Conferences/Seminars

Date of Conference: October 23, 2017

The Kennan Institute will be hosting its final event marking the 100^th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Speakers will focus on the policies of the Provisional Government, the Bolshevik victory, and the political and military consequences that followed in its immediate aftermath. The seminar will be followed by a book talk from 4:00 – 5:30 by William Taubman, who will be discussing his new biography on Mikhail Gorbachev. Thus, the day’s proceedings will cover the beginning and the end of the Soviet Union.

The seminar has been generously supported by the editorial board of the book series Russia’s Great War and Revolution, a multinational scholarly effort that aims to fundamentally transform understanding of Russia’s “continuum of crisis” during the years 1914-1922. The book talk is an event in the Washington History Seminar series, sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program. Continue reading “Conference: Commemorating the Revolution: October 1917 (Woodrow Wilson Center)”

Date of event: October 5-7

Those in the Chicago area are invited to attend the Lost Experiments in Soviet Art conference and music festival, both with wonderful lineups. With the exception of the last concert (at Pianoforte, tickets $15), all events are at the University of Chicago, and are free and open to the public. For more information see the UC website, or contact Julia Vaingurt (vaingurt@gmail.com), Miriam Tripaldi (miriamtripaldi@uchicago.edu), or William Nickell (wnickell@uchicago.edu)

Found in Time: Lost Experiments in Soviet Art, 1940-1960

Power in Sound: The Music of Galina Ustvolskaya

University of Chicago, October 5-7, 2017

Continue reading “Conference: Lost Experiments in Soviet Art (U of Chicago)”

Dates of the Conference: March 29-April 1, 2018

Reading Race in Cold War Cultural Internationalism
An ACLA Seminar (UCLA, March 29-April 1, 2018)
Organized by Cate I. Reilly, Duke University

This seminar looks at the intertwined Soviet and Eastern Bloc legacies on race, cultural solidarity, and geopolitics. It moves beyond the extensive body of prior scholarship on regional ethnic minorities within Central and Eastern Europe and related questions of religious conflict. The seminar instead focuses on how writers, artists, and filmmakers in Central and Eastern Europe and across decolonizing regions during the Cold War, conceived of and negotiated race in the context of newfound, transnational aesthetic commitments.

The seminar asks: How did the epistemic effort to think internationally (by intellectuals from the USSR, GDR, Africa, and the Americas) interface with questions of racial identity? How did such concerns play out when the rough ideological alliances between the Eastern Bloc and emerging nations were challenged by writers and thinkers who were critical of the Soviet Union? In what ways did the early political framework of international solidarity in the USSR, conceived under the heading of the “Friendship of the Peoples,” contain a racialized dimension later played out in the global power struggles of the Cold War? How should frequent claims to racial equality in the Eastern Bloc be treated when occurring in the context of anti-imperialist (and anti-U.S.) propaganda?

The seminar invites literary-critical and interdisciplinary reflections on the conflicted history of race in Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War, as situated against a backdrop of changing ideological and national alliances.  It pays specific attention to a gap within postcolonial theory related to Soviet ideologies and cultural influences. Building on recent conferences that have addressed the legacy of Bandung humanisms, “translating” race in Eurasia, and performances of difference in Central and Eastern Europe, it moves temporally forward from the abundance of research on the role of minorities in the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s. Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to: Eurasia’s place in postcolonial theory; literature and national autonomy movements of the Cold War; the conflicted relationship between the Communist and non-Communist intellectuals (Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Léopold Senghor, Cheikh Anta Diop, among others); negritude and internationalism; translation and the circulation of texts/media between Eastern Europe and Africa; the influence of Socialist realist literature on African writers.

Interested applicants should submit a 250-300 word proposal.