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POSTPONED: Human-Non-Human Entanglements of Prediction in Permafrost-Bound Land (with Olga Ulturgasheva)
This event has been postponed to Spring 2021. The intensification of ecological fragility and rapidity of environmental change in the Siberian Arctic questions adaptability and human capacity to predict and avert ecological disasters while pointing at potential limitations of available models for forecasting and mitigating environmental calamities. Given the bounded human capacity for predicting unpredictable, the challenge is to craft a tentative strategy that takes into detailed and balanced consideration limitations and productive potential of knowledge whether scientific or public.…
Find out more »On Cameras and Guns in Soviet Film Culture (with Maria Vinogradova, New York University)
In the Soviet pantheon of fantasy-machines cameras and guns occupied a special place: if cinema was proclaimed the most important of all arts, then the most powerful cinema was capable of producing “sniper shots” that delivered a fully truthful, objective and scientific image of the world. In this talk Jordan Center visiting scholar Maria Vinogradova explores such metaphors, focusing on the concept and practice of “film-hunting” (kinookhota) as it developed after the 1950s. In the Soviet film avant-garde the likes…
Find out more »The Difficulty Of Ending a Story: On the “Thick Novels“ of Russian Realism (with Schamma Schahadat and Discussant Kate Holland)
Join us for another installment of the 19v Seminar Series! The endings of (realist) novels are just as difficult as their beginnings; although the novels pretend that beginnings as well as endings are logical parts of a narrative, starting with the birth of a person or the meeting two future lovers and ending with either death or marriage, they are, mostly, contingent. While the beginning is difficult because it has to be original ("desire is always there at the beginning…
Find out more »A Trial Against Racial Hatred: White Chauvinism and International Communism (with Sean Guillory)
Join us for a joint event with Yale University's Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. On 1 March 1931, the American Communist Party held a show trial in Harlem where over 2,000 attendees witnessed the conviction of August Yokinen, a Finnish immigrant and CP member, for “white chauvinism.” The trial was unprecedented. The Communist Party usually dealt with expulsions internally. That a white man was “convicted” for racism in the United States became a media spectacle. Moreover, the…
Find out more »Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism (with Tatiana Linkhoeva, New York University)
Revolution Goes East is an intellectual history that applies a novel global perspective to the classic story of the rise of communism and the various reactions it provoked in Imperial Japan. Tatiana Linkhoeva demonstrates how contemporary discussions of the Russian Revolution, its containment, and the issue of imperialism played a fundamental role in shaping Japan's imperial society and state. In this bold approach, Linkhoeva explores attitudes toward the Soviet Union and the communist movement among the Japanese military and politicians,…
Find out more »Exoticism Abroad: Vasilii Polenov and Ilia Repin’s Visual Experimentations with Ethnic and Racial Difference in Paris (with Maria Taroutina and Discussant Nathaniel Knight)
Join us for another installment of the 19v Seminar Series! Vasilii Polenov and Ilia Repin’s three-year sojourn in Paris from 1873 to 1876 as pensioners of the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts has long been the subject of considerable interest among Russian and Western scholars alike. To date, most investigations into this topic have centered on their formative encounter with the French avant-garde, and especially the Impressionists, and their stylistic experimentations with plein air painting. However, less attention has been paid…
Find out more »New Research in the 19th-century Russian Gothic (with Katherine Bowers and Valeria Sobol)
Join us for another installment of the 19v Seminar Series! This virtual discussion will focus on new research in gothic studies in 19th-century Russian literature. The gothic tradition exercised significant influence on the history of Russian literature and culture, but is frequently critically overlooked in our discipline. Valeria Sobol (U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) and Katherine Bowers (U of British Columbia) will speak on their books on the subject, Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny (Northern Illinois University Press/Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2020) and Writing Fear:…
Find out more »Russian Internet Memes: The Short Course, Part Seventeen
The final installment in the weekly series of informal virtual Zoom lectures about memes and viral videos on the Russian Internet, presented by our very own Eliot Borenstein. Please see below for the information you will need to join the meeting, or click the link above. Part Seventeen - Comrade Lenin and the Gang: Memes about Soviet Leaders Lenin lives, but he’s probably not too happy about it. After deuces as the subjects of popular jokes, it should be no…
Find out more »Russian Electoral Interference: Present, Past, and Future
Join us on Zoom for a 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 New York University Center for Social Media and Politics. In the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, one of the most enduring stories has been the scale with which Russia exploited weaknesses in the digital information environment to interfere with foreign elections,…
Find out more »Women on the Market: The Dowerless Bride in 19th-Century Russia (with Colleen Lucey and Discussant Katherine Pickering Antonova)
Join us for another installment of the 19v Seminar Series! In this talk, Colleen Lucey will give a brief overview of her forthcoming book, Love for Sale: Representing Prostitution in Imperial Russia, before presenting her chapter on the figure of the dowerless bride in nineteenth-century literature and visual culture. She will be joined by her discussant, Katherine Pickering Antonova. Evocative of women’s objectification and their secondary social status, dowerless brides embodied the commodification of marriage and the belief every woman could…
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