CREEES Professional Resources Forum

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