Events

January 2025

22 January 2025 ·Rodolphe Baudin and Catherine Phillips

Why “Frantsuzik”? Why “Bordeaux”? Gallophobia, Intersectionality and Colonial Anxiety in Griboedov’s Woe from Wit

Why “Frantsuzik”? Why “Bordeaux”? Gallophobia, Intersectionality and Colonial Anxiety in Griboedov’s Woe from Wit

Join us for the first 19v seminar this year! This talk offers a close-reading of the expression “Frantsuzik iz Bordo” (“The little Frenchman from Bordeaux”), a famous quote from Alexander Griboedov’s classic comedy Woe from Wit (Gore ot uma).

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February 2025

10 February 2025 ·Michele Rivkin-Fish

Unmaking Russia's Abortion Culture. Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics

Unmaking Russia's Abortion Culture. Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics

Abortion was the most common form of birth control in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, a situation that reflected key paradoxes of state socialism: women held formal equality but lacked basic needs such as contraceptives.

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12 February 2025 ·Oleksandra Keudel

Societal Resilience and Polycentric Governance: Learning from Ukrainian Local Communities’ Response to the Full-Scale Russian Invasion

Societal Resilience and Polycentric Governance: Learning from Ukrainian Local Communities’ Response to the Full-Scale Russian Invasion

The Russian full-scale invasion since 24 February 2022 subjected Ukraine to overlapping war-related crises, such as physical insecurity, internal displacement, and damage to critical infrastructure.

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18 February 2025 ·Philip Tuxbury-Gleissner

The Lives of the Socialist Literary Journal: Embedded Modes of Independent Culture under State Socialism

The Lives of the Socialist Literary Journal: Embedded Modes of Independent Culture under State Socialism

In the Soviet Union and socialist Eastern Europe, literary journals enjoyed remarkable popularity. They not only provided access to sensational works of literature but figured as visually appealing objects and social events in everyday life.

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20 February 2025 ·Justine Buck Quijada

Scholars to Shamans: The Academic Roots of Buryat National Tradition in the late Soviet period

Scholars to Shamans: The Academic Roots of Buryat National Tradition in the late Soviet period

While the collapse of the Soviet Union may have been unthinkable until it actually happened, it is clear that there were significant shifts in Soviet popular culture in the 70’s and 80’s that shaped what came after the collapse.

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March 2025

3 March 2025 ·Darja (Dasha) Filippova

Film Screening: Semiconductor, 2018

Film Screening: Semiconductor, 2018

If I want to eat a piece of gingerbread I will choose one that is completely plain and not a piece which represents a baby in arms of a horserider, a piece which is covered over and over with decoration. “Ornament and Crime,” Adolf Loos, 1908

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