Category: Call for Submissions

Deadline: December 1, 2022

At the turn of the 20th century, Russian and Western intellectuals were much taken by the mystical, the enigmatic, and the transcendental, not least, Helen Blavatsky with her Theosophical quest and Rudolf Steiner with his elaboration of Anthroposophy— the latter, according to Nikolai Berdiaev, being “one of the most interesting tendencies… attracting cultivated people such as Viacheslav Ivanov and Andrei Belyi.”  By the early 1880s Russian translations of occult authors, such as Louis Jacolliot, Charles Richet, and Frank Podmore were already appearing, Russian writers like Aleksandr Butlerov with his “Stat’i po mediumizmu” and Aleksandr Aksakov with his Animizm i spiritizm following rapidly . Esoteric periodicals  Rebus, Izida, and Vestnik Teosofii also mushroomed, coinciding with new interpretations of Orthodoxy as well as scientific investigations into the human psyche and the nervous system. In particular, mental illness, as another state of consciousness, formed a cardinal subject of both scholarly and artistic inquiry, a tendency which left a deep imprint on writers such as Leonid Andreev, Anton Chekhov, and Vsevolod Garshin.

Deadline: January 15, 2023

https://www.jis3.org/callforpapers2023
Suggested Themes:
It is by now legendary that the 20th century was “the American Century.”
But, did the West celebrate prematurely the implosion of the Soviet
empire? Apart from the “Havana Syndrome,” Putin’s Russia, and its war
in Ukraine, remains a major geopolitical rival, with its hackers holding
U.S. companies hostage for ransom. Among communist one-party
states–People’s Republic of China, N. Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and
Cuba–“China” poses the greatest challenge. China’s hackers steal U.S.
civilian and military tech secrets, while its trade and investment
policies, 5G broadband, quantum communications, and Artificial
Intelligence aim to create dependent “vassal” states, undermining
democracies abroad, and suppressing dissent at home (laogai–the Chinese
Gulag).

Deadline: November 15, 2022

Editors: Seth Graham (University College London), Rachel Morley (University College London), Beata Waligórska-Olejniczak (Adam Mickiewicz University)

1) Scope of the special issue and the relevance of the subject:

The 2022 edition of ‘Millennium Docs Against Gravity’, Poland’s largest documentary film festival, featured a Susan Sontag retrospective that included her work Waiting for Godot…in Sarajevo, made in the Bosnian capital during the siege and codirected with Nicole Stéphane. The film, which is often described as Sontag’s lasting gift to Sarajevans and which gave them hope and the possibility of responding to suppressed emotions, today inevitably brings to mind places such as Kyiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol, whose suffering inhabitants and ruined architecture have made us doubt the existence of a civilized world. Focusing attention on the mission of art and the role of the artist as an engaged witness of reality, this special issue of “Studia Rossica Posnaniensia” will concentrate on urban experiences of all kinds of conflicts: military, political, interpersonal, ethnic, religious, environmental, etc. We would like to pinpoint the role of Eastern European cities as sites of power and powerlessness, as spaces where pain is/was inflicted, contemplated, embodied, expressed or (re)negotiated, and as intersections of different cultures and traditions (e.g. Catholicism and Orthodoxy). We would also welcome proposals rooted in gender studies, queer studies, post-colonial studies, disability studies, performative studies and animal studies, that may offer perspectives on the city space as a battlefield for one’s dignity, rights and identity. We expect that authors might refer to Sontag’s belief in the artist’s social and ethical duty to explore the link between the aesthetic and the political as well as the relationship between the mind and the body in urban environments.

Deadline: September 1, 2022

Rupture: When Things Fall Apart

We were warned, repeatedly. But on February 24, 2022, the vast majority of Ukrainians, Russians, and the rest of the world was stunned. Not only by the Russian invasion of Ukraine but also by how rapidly the order of things can radically change and crumble. In response, we are devoting a special issue of The Russian Review to the theme of Rupture: When Things Fall Apart. By “rupture” we imagine a sudden rift in historical time but also a spatial dis- and relocation that manifests in the fragmentation of regions and world areas as political units and subjects of knowledge. The peoples of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia have had recurrent experiences with socio-political and historical rupture, and our field has done extensive work on previous ruptures, most notably 1917 and 1991, years of rupture that “shook” and reconfigured the world.