Jordan Center for the
Advanced Study of Russia

The collapse of socialist regimes during 1989-1991 profoundly affected the conditions of knowledge production about the former socialist countries. The “transition to liberal democracy and capitalism” substituted the “know-your-enemy” paradigm, but hardly rescued the scholarship on the Soviet Union and other socialist countries from the area-studies model of knowledge production and had little impact on the core, “universal” disciplines focused on the West. At the same time, the epistemological subordination of the former socialist countries to the West- and capitalism-centered…

Join us for another 19v seminar! The study of literature in Russia challenges notions about the markets, readers, and writers of Russian literature, which was quite well integrated with European markets. According to my data, foreign novels accounted for around 90% of the market through the middle of the century. European sentimental novels, translations, and women writers circulated internationally, and were central to the fabric of nineteenth-century literary life throughout Europe and Russia. George Sand may be the most studied…

For the second installment of "Women, Feminists, and Other Poets: A Series of Readings and Conversations," the Jordan Center will host Oksana Vasyakina, Elena Fanailova, and Stephanie Sandler. This April, the Jordan Center will host 6 contemporary Russian poets for a series of readings and conversations. With a view to the recent anthology F-Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (isolarii, 2020), this series probes the recent history of women writing poetry in Russian. Whether explicitly feminist or otherwise, women have been prominent, if not…

During the First World War, Russia’s government and public organization sent sick and wounded soldiers to various health resorts across the empire. The ideal aim of this project was to heal the combatants with the help of the bountiful nature of the homeland. In this enterprise, the treatment of tuberculous soldiers in the sanatorium occupied a special place. It had its own history in the form of the people’s sanatorium movement of the pre-war decades, which sought to offer the…