For over thirty years, the Lukiškės Square question remains the biggest mnemonic dilemma in Vilnius. Known as Lenin Square during the Soviet occupation, it used to have a focal point – Nikolay Tomskiy’s statue of the Leader of the World Proletariat – and a clear function – the principal site of mass gatherings and official […]
One of the most underreported human catastrophes of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is the ongoing cultural and existential erasure of the country’s Nadazov Greek population, which, prior to the war, constituted the third-largest ethnic group (after Ukrainians and Russians) in the bitterly contested Donetsk region. Most of these Greeks were concentrated in and around the […]
Over the past year, changing the date of celebration of Christmas in Ukraine to align it with both Western Christianity and the Eastern Orthodox churches associated with the Patriarchate of Constantinople, has taken the symbolic importance of the dissociation in religious matters from Russia, a process with a specific historicity. The fact that realignments within […]
Join us for another 19v seminar! This talk will focus on two important poems, both unusual for Nekrasov’s oeuvre — “Внимая ужасам войны…” (“Listening to the Horrors of War…”) and “— Так, служба, сам ты в той войне…” (“Yes, Soldier! You in That War…” ). Both texts grapple with the experiences of men confronting military […]
The war in Ukraine has highlighted one of the most entrenched challenges in contemporary global journalism: the lack of diversity in foreign correspondence. War and conflict reporters shape our perceptions of the fundamental contours of any conflict: accountability, root political drivers, historical context, wider geopolitics, and the nature of civilian suffering. Please join Global Journalism […]
Prominent Ukrainian writer and history professor Olena Stiazhkina, exiled from Donetsk since the 2014 Russian occupation, will give a presentation on the occasion of the upcoming publication of her two books in the English language, the novel "Cecil the Lion Had to Die" and "Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary". In her talk she will […]
Professors Eileen Kane, Masha Kirosirova, and Mararet Litvin will present their new edited volume, Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History. The volume has been described as "a milestone in global and transregional history. It challenges the view of empires and regions as enclosed or competing. Instead, it reveals a wide range of exchanges and entanglements. From […]
How do states and societies confront the legacies of war and occupation, and what do truth, guilt, and justice mean in that process? The talk examines people’s wartime choices and their aftermath in Belarus, a war-ravaged Soviet republic that was under Nazi occupation during the Second World War. After the Red Army reestablished control over […]
In this talk, Professor Nicolosi will analyze the political discourse on the war against Ukraine in today’s Russia with a focus on Putin's rhetoric. He argues that this discourse is based on a paranoid interpretation of history, in which two main elements are of key significance: a sense of deep resentment and discursive practices of […]
Join us for another 19v seminar! In April 1800, after a century of building an intellectual infrastructure around foreign texts, the Russian Empire under Paul I banned all importation of books and music from abroad. Using materials from the Latvian State Historical Archive (LVVA) in Riga, my paper looks at the underappreciated prehistory of this decision: the […]
