Jordan Center for the
Advanced Study of Russia

Join us for another installment of the 19v Seminar Series! Against the backdrop of photographic practices in the wider Caucasus region, this presentation looks to address theoretical and methodological specifics of the history of photography in imperial times and to map some of the networks that provided the conceptual and practical basis for the production, circulation and reception of photographic images. As the project in progress puts an emphasis on shared histories and the entanglement of photographic practices across imperial…

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…

Featuring:

Nicu Popescu, Director of the Wider Europe Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations
Samuel Greene, Director of the Russia Institute at King’s College London
Maria Snegovaya, Visiting Scholar at George Washington University and Postdoctoral Scholar at the Virginia Tech PPE Program
Andrey Kortunov, Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council
Viktoriya Zhuravleva, Head of the Center for North American Studies at the Primakov National Research Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO)

In the wake of the 2020 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.

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,…

Between the Soviet Union’s outreach to countries like Egypt and Afghanistan in the mid-1950s and the growing role of Communists in Iraq following that country’s 1958 revolution, Muslim intellectuals and ulema feared the expansion of Communism in the Middle East. They began to conceive of Islam as a distinct ideological system and alternative to capitalism and socialism, and they looked to other post-colonial countries for models of how they could organize political organizations to rival Communist parties. Taking advantage of…

Utility (pol’za) was a watchword of Empress Elizabeth’s reign (1741-61). The 1745 Atlas of the Russian Empire, published in nineteen regional maps and a general map of the empire, was presented in this spirit. The atlas united “geographical rules” and “new observations” to create a complete picture of the All-Russian Empire and contiguous lands. The visual and the imperial intersect in two important ways in the crafting of the Atlas. First, scientific visualization by specialists trained in geography and astronomy,…

At a time when nearly everyone else was writing about nature as something to be conquered, Eisenstein was joining personal experience with Romantic and Indigenous tropes to write about self-immersion in nature as a a source of individual liberation, a model for understanding film reception, and a blueprint for a utopian socialist collective. This presentation will examine his 1945 essay, “The Music of Landscape,” to show how immersion in nature offered Eisenstein new avenues for further developing his ideas about…

Join us for another 19v seminar! This presentation is dedicated to Alexander Druzhinin’s spectacularly influential epistolary novella Polin’ka Saks, published at the end of 1847 in Sovremennik.  Professor Ilya Kliger will attempt an analysis of Polinka Saks with an eye to the wider context of Russian and Western domestic fiction and with special attention to a small corpus of texts – translated and original, literary, belletristic, and scholarly – published the same year in the same journal.  Most broadly at stake is the distinctiveness…