Jordan Center hosts North East Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Conference


Image by Ilaria Parogni

On March 21, 2015, the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia hosted the 36th Annual Meeting of the North East Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Conference. Roughly fifty participants came together to present and participate in lively discussions of the day. The conference consisted of nine panels touching on subjects varying from the psychological in Russian art and life, symbolic geography, Soviet film, Polish politics, émigré culture, to post-Communist culture and politics.

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Professor Lounsbery is among the keynote speakers at University of Virginia


Anne Lounsbery by Ilaria Parogni

On March 26, Professor Anne Lounsbery, chair of the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, will be addressing the audience of “Centrifugal Forces: Reading Russia’s Regional Identities and Initiatives,” a three-day conference held at the University of Virginia. Lounsbery will speak on the perceived “symbolic geography” of Russia’s provinces.

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Irina Sandomirskaja discusses cultural significance of Russian icon in Soviet context


Irina Sandomirskaja by Ilaria Parogni

On March 13, 2015, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia welcomed Irina Sandomirskaja, Professor of Cultural Studies at Södertörn University, to present a paper entitled “Originating in Return: Russian Past, Soviet Legacy, and Critical Cultural Heritage Theory.” After a brief introduction by Professor Anne Lounsbery, chair of the NYU department of Russian and Slavic Studies, Sandomirskaja stated that in the past she has worked extensively on the relationship between image and word; now she has set off to study the object. In particular, she focused her study on the Russian Orthodox icon and its re-appropriation in Soviet cultural politics.

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“Those crazy Americans, of course Pushkin’s not black!”


Last Friday, a group of scholars gathered in the wonderful space of NYU’s newly established Africa house to discuss connections of various forms between Russian and Africa.
We were a notably eclectic collective, including a Nigerian professor who studied in the USSR, the daughter of a Russian woman and an Angolan man who was born in Soviet Uzbekistan, an American historian of Russia married to an Africanist, a young scholar working on a book manuscript about the Soviet Afro-Asian writers’ organisation, a historian of African interested in global expression of blackness, a documentary film maker, and a early-stage graduate student perhaps feeling her way to a Russian-African topic.

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Cultures of War: Homefronts



Saturday’s panel “Homefronts”, part of this past weekend’s international symposium Cultures of War: From the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution, saw a lively discussion of the domestic experience of war, focusing on the social consequences of mobilization for warfare

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