Category: Resources

I would like to draw to your attention details of the book summarizing the results of the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Russian Studies. It is published by Routledge in our series Studies in Contemporary Russia and will come to open access in the next month.

https://www.routledge.com/Russian-Modernization-A-New-Paradigm/Kivinen-Humphreys/p/book/9780367567255

Russian Modernization: A New Paradigm – 1st Edition – Markku Kivinen

Deadline: March 18, 2022

The Slavic Reference Service will be facilitating the next cycle of the Doctoral Student Peer Mentoring Program this Spring. This program aims to connect doctoral students at all levels of study and in all disciplines conducting research related to Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasia. Through this program, we hope to foster networking and mentoring among emerging scholars. Interested students can register for the program here: https://forms.gle/D3qdzdWSBfb6NmcT9. Please register by March 18 to be mentor matched and participate in an initial meet and greet event. Questions may be directed to srscite@library.illinois.edu. We hope that you will encourage students to apply as mentees and mentors

On behalf of the AATSEEL Graduate Student Committee, I am writing to encourage graduate students in Slavic and Eastern European Studies to join our organization. This is a wonderful opportunity for graduate students to collaborate with other colleagues and gain service experience valuable for professional development. The main goal of the committee is to help graduate students improve their experience at the conference.  

Every year at the AATSEEL Conference, the graduate student committee meets and gathers opinions from graduate students in Slavic Studies, then communicates them to the Executive Council. We also organize special events and panels at the conference, which will help you to meet other graduate students and build relationships with professionals in the field.

We welcome diverse students from all countries and universities! If interested (and we hope you are!), you can sign up by emailing me at ashkireva@umass.edu. We are also encouraging you to participate by attending the Graduate Committee meeting at the AATSEEL 2022 conference, which will take place on the 18th of February (3:30-4:30). We will be thrilled to see new faces tomorrow!

Please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions by emailing me at ashkireva@umass.edu

Join the new SOYUZ listserv!

Soyuz is broadly conceived as a group of scholars working in postsocialist studies. It serves as a vehicle to promote the study of postsocialist societies, the dissemination of current research, and collaborative and interdisciplinary work among an international community of scholars. For a long time, Soyuz had a listserv through H-Net/H-Commons, but we decided to make a more inclusive listserv with a platform (Google Groups) that is easy for people to manage. Some of you have already been added to the listserv. If you want to be added or change your email address, just email the Soyuz webmaster Dafna Rachok (darachok [at] iu.edu). This listserv is seen as complementing the Soyuz Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/groups/SoyuzNetwork/) and the Soyuz website (https://soyuz.americananthro.org/).  

In December 2021 Academic Studies Press published The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse, Volume One: The Path from Disaster toward Russian “Democracy” by David Cratis Williams, Marilyn J. Young, and Michael K. Launer. In the early 1980s the Communist Party still maintained nearly total control of political messaging in the USSR. This situation began to change after KAL007 was shot down in 1983. Then came Chernobyl (1986), which led to the development of a nascent civil society and, ultimately, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Volume One focuses on analysis of rhetoric, public address, and political argumentation during the late Soviet period. Various studies (some previously unpublished) describe interactions between the US and USSR concerning these events. 

We would like to draw your attention to some resources available for students, teachers and researchers in the Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat (PSDS) (https://samizdatcollections.library.utoronto.ca) at the University of Toronto Library. Under the button “Journals,” you will find scanned issues of over 20 samizdat journals. This is a unique resource on uncensored art and literature of the late Soviet period. The set includes the landmark edition of Soviet conceptualism, the MANI folios, from the Forschungsstelle Osteuropa at Bremen University, as well as a full set of issues of the important Leningrad journal Chasy (The Clock, 1-80), furnished by the Andrei Belyi Centre in St. Petersburg. Users will also find nearly full sets of the outstanding journals Thirty–Seven and Transponans.