Upcoming Events
Events List Navigation
Medical Ethics and the Crisis of the Doctor-Patient Relationship in the Early Soviet Union (with Kenneth Pinnow)
The Bolsheviks promised to provide universal public health. As part of that effort, they sought to make interactions between doctors and patients regular and normal. Seeing a doctor and receiving medical care would be important points of contact with Soviet power. However, with increased interactions between physicians and the public also came increased opportunities for misunderstandings and conflicts. Patients, particularly those from the newly empowered laboring classes, complained about inattentive, incompetent, and rude physicians. Doctors complained about uncooperative, overly demanding,…
Find out more »US-Russia Relations After the US Elections: What Can We Expect?
Join us for another virtual meeting of the New York-Russia Public Policy Seminar. This panel is being co-hosted by Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, and the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia). In the wake of the US presidential election, please join us for a discussion involving academic and policy perspectives from the US, Russia, and Europe on the future of the bilateral relationship. Is the US election…
Find out more »Price Tags for Wet Land: Resource-making in Late Imperial Russia (with Katja Bruisch)
In late imperial Russia, rising demand for energy and widespread concerns about the depletion of forests caused an interest in peat as an industrial fuel. In the booming industrial districts of the Vladimir and Moscow provinces in particular, factory owners adopted peat fuel to fire furnaces and operate engines, while railroad operators made experiments to move trains with the help of peat. Their efforts were encouraged by the imperial state which, itself an owner of substantial peatbogs, provided the personal…
Find out more »Soviet and Post-Soviet Histories of Race
Though “race” was never a category the Soviet authorities used much, their nationalities policy in the 1920s and support for interwar anti-colonial movements made the USSR probably the one country in the world that made anti-racism not only a domestic but an international priority and invested in it accordingly. Late Stalinism, with the collective punishment of whole peoples (and their accompanying racialization), with its antisemitic campaign, and open acknowledgement of Russians as “the first people” of the Union blunted this…
Find out more »Poor Liza and Russia’s Sentimental Marketplace (with Kirill Ospovat)
The talk will investigate links between narrative modes and visions of economy that defined Russian sentimentalism. While in English-language Russianist scholarship social aspects of sentimental fiction have been largely ignored, they occupy a central place both in Soviet-era studies and in contemporary interpretations of English and French sentimentalism. Through a close reading of Karamzin’s classic Poor Liza I will illuminate the constructions of “sentimental commerce” which aligned specific modes of subjectivity and spectatorship with visions of the market, debates on…
Find out more »