Conference Program
The cost of the conference is $40 for professionals and $25 for graduate students. One may pay in advance via Pay Pal or on the day of the conference by cash or check. If you can pay by cash or check on the day of the conference, it saves us the 3% Pay Pal fee. However, we understand the convenience of the Pay Pal option. Please use this “Donate” link to pay for the conference via PayPal.
FRIDAY, APRIL 17 – 4– 5:45 pm.
Bogdan Horbal, the Curator for Slavic and East European Collections at the NYPL, will talk about the Library's collections in your fields of interest, collaborative collection development with other libraries, access to materials, study rooms, and fellowships. There will be a popup exhibit of Slavic and East European collections, including prints presented by Rebecca Szantyr, Print Specialist II. The attendees will also be invited to join a brief tour of the Library. Click here to register.
SATURDAY, APRIL 18
RSVP to attend in person.
Breakfast — 8:30-9:00 am, Room 222
SESSION I — 9:00-10:45 am
I.1 Shaping Socialist World(s) via Nationality Policy: Cross/Border Perspectives Jordan Center Conference Room
Chair: Ekaterina Kokovikhina, CUNY, NYU
Anna Linetskaya
University of Pennsylvania
“Soviet Subject, Interrupted”: How Soviet Xenophobia, Soviet
Ethnophilia, and Other Political Fictions Interfered with Sovietization of the Maritime Korean Diaspora
De’Vonte Tinsely
University of Pennsylvania
Leninist Nationality Policy and the Vietnamese Revolution
Maksim Lukin
University of Pennsylvania
Perestroika’s “Returned Literature”: Restructuring Cultural Canons in
Ogonek and Druzhba Narodov Magazines (1986-1990)
Discussant: Dr. Tatiana Linkhoeva (NYU), tatiana.linkhoeva@nyu.edu
I.2 Politics in the South Caucasus: IR and Regional Perspectives Room 101
Chair: Kristian Kafozov, NYU
Gia Mosashvili
NYU
Small Countries’ Grand Strategies to Preserve Sovereignty amid
Great-Power Competition: A Case Study of Georgia
Aspram Israelya
Harvard University
Russia’s use of coercion in Georgia and alliance-based leverage in
Armenia (1991-2008)
Matthew Kelbaugh
University of Maryland Global Campus
Unrecognized Ethnocracy in Regional Power Gridlock: Abkhazia between Russia, Turkey, and Georgia
Discussant: Kristian Kafozov, NYU,
kristian.kafozov09@my.stjohns.edu
I.3 Perspectives on Ukraine
Room 222
Chair: Elise Giuliano, Columbia University
Pavlo Smytsnyuk
NYU
Does Ukraine Have a Political Theology? Sophia of Kyiv and the Struggle with Empire
Azam Zarchi
NYU
Lost Girls of War: Human Trafficking, Gendered Violence, and the
Political Economy of Conflict in Ukraine
Yana Prymachenko
Princeton University
War over the Past: Decolonizing World War II in Wartime Ukraine
Alina Ielisieieva
Independent Scholar
Remembering Ukraine: Migrant Identity and Retrospective
Self-Construction in Marina Lewycka’s Ukrainian-British Narrative
Discussant: Anastasiia Vlasenko, Columbia University,
av3228@columbia.edu
I.4 Literary Encounters
Room 224
Chair: Dario Lucero, NYU
Rusina Volkova
Independent Scholar
Salome as a Precursor of Lolita
Marina Minskaya
Independent Scholar
Nabokov: The flame of my memory
Marilyn Smith
Amherst College
Finding Common Ground: Dmitry Mirsky and John Cournos
Lana Belenkaia
NYU
Collection and the Fragmentation of Reality in Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence And Konstantin Vaginov’s Garpagoniana
Discussant : TBD
I.5 Visual and Performative Arts
Room 225
Chair: Kaspars Germanis, The Center for Geopolitics Studies, Riga
Anastasiia Kozyreva
INALCO (Paris, France)
Highlighting the Personal through the Ordinary Post-Soviet Landscape:
Phototexts of Dmitri Markov and Yulia Shatun
Natalia Chernyaeva
Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology (Kuntskamera), St. Petersburg
Imagining the Ethnic Other: Russian Colonial Photography of the Sakha People and Its Postcolonial Revision in Contemporary Film
Magdalena Measic
University of Rijeka
Staging Soviet Past: Contemporary Operatic Practices in Post-2022
Europe
Celeste Pagniello
Princeton University
Russia’s Georgia and the Politics of Musical Fantasy
Discussant: Rachael Niedinger, Harvard University,
rachael.meidinger@gmail.com
I.6 Contemporary Political Science Perspective
Room 228
Chair: Kate Graney, Skidmore College
Justin Reynier
McGill University
Explaining Democratic Claims in Authoritarian Labor Movement:
Evidence from Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia
Gustav Lunderberg
Sodertorn University
The Politics of Polarization? Exploring Latvia’s Ethnopolitical Spiral
(1997-2022)
Dominykas Navickas
Harvard University
Democratic Backsliding in Central Europe: Impact of
president-parliament relationship for the diverging patterns of democratic backsliding in Lithuania and Poland
Discussant: Olena Nikolayenko, Fordham University,
onikolayenko@fordham.edu
I.7 Historical Perspectives Early Modern Era
Room 229
Chair: Greg Martin, NYU
Peter Brown
Rhode Island College
Recent Trends in the Study of Reproduction, Demography and Infirmity in Early Modern Eastern Europe
Virginia Zickafoose
Independent Scholar
Town Limits of Tolerance: A Geospatial Study of Official and Political Networks of Owners of Evangelizing Private Towns, Founders of Congregations and
Meeting Houses, and Jewish Settlement in the 16th Century Rzeczpospolita
Discussant: Greg Martin, NYU, gm3756@nyu.edu
SESSION II — 11:00 am-12:45 pm
II.9 Perspectives on the Russian War in Ukraine
Room 101
Chair: Galina Bogatova, NYU and Union College
Kaspar Germanis
The Center for Geopolitics Studies, Riga
Small-state policies in changing times. The case of Latvia in the context of history and security in 2026
Violetta Soboleva
CUNY Graduate Center
Civic Engagement in Conditions of War: Cross-Group Interaction Among Russian and Ukrainian Students and Activists
Kyeong-A Lee
MAIR, GSAS, NYU
Russia’s Securitization of the Northern Sea Route and Korea’s Indirect
Geopolitical Strategy for Maximizing National Interests
Yana Balanchuk
Columbia University
Informal Executive Centralization in Ukraine after 2019:
Semi-Presidentialism, Single-Party Majority Parliament, and War
Discussant: Nikolai Shatalin, Goethe University Frankfurt,
nikolas.shatalin@gmail.com
II.10 Russian Literature
Room 222
Chair: Auriane Benabou, NYU
Anna Zalewska
Harvard University
‘A House with Children is a Bazaar, without Children – a Grave.’
Involuntary Childlessness in a Russian Folktale in the Context of Rural
Socio-Cultural and Economic Realities from the 19th to the Mid-20th
Centuries
Daniel Arias
NYU- RSS Department
Vitalized Matter and Productive Nostalgia in Ilya Kavakov’s Installations: Ten Characters and Labyrinth, My Mother’s Album
Elizaveta Kheresh
Harvard University
Who Lived on the Battlefield of Poltava? Alexei Parshchikov Between
Empires and Identities
Discussant: TBD
II.11 Russian Identity Politics Past and Present
Room 224
Chair: Kate Graney, Skidmore College
Helen Hopersky
University of Oxford
Nation Without Territory: Mission and Cultural Continuity in the Russian Abroad, 1920-1939
Daniel Bethke
Tufts University
The Specter of Constantinople: Byzantium's Political Resurrection in
Russian Memory Politics
Addis Maso
University of New Hampshire
Tribe, Race, & Ethnicity in Vissarion Belinskii's Progressive Russian
Nationalism
Discussant: Kate Graney, Skidmore College, kgraney@skidmore.edu
II.12 Transnational Politics During the Soviet Era
Room 225
Chair: Kristof Kafozov, NYU
Gregory Martin
NYU
Peasants of the World, Unite! The Peasant International (Krestintern) in
China, 1924-1930
Philip Decker
Princeton University
The Führer’s Eyes in Moscow: Interpersonal Contact Between Citizens of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, 1939-1941
Zeynep Dursun
Binghamton University
Central Asian Migrants during the Cold War: Turkestanism and
Expanding Diasporic Networks
Yacov Zohn Muldoon
University of Redland
The Ukrainian Football Federation Declares Independence (1959-1965)
Discussant: Nulan Kabdylkhak nurlan.kabdylkhak@stonybrook.edu
II.13 Politics of Film
Room 228
Chair: Eliot Borenstein, NYU
Bjorn Ingvoldstad
Bridgewater State University
Voices of the New Belarus: From Stage to Screen
Yufei Qi
NYU
Plasticity of Cinematic Time: Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates
Maria Reshetnikova
Independent Scholar
The Role of the Individual in HIstory”: Roots Film TV Archive
Discussant: Eliot Borenstein, NYU, eb7@nyu.edu
II.14 Roundtable: Who Owns Culture? Labor and Property in the Post/Socialist Cultural Production
Room 229
Chair: Marton Szarvas, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design
Patricia Manos
Independent Researcher
Katja Praznik
University at Buffalo
Marton Szarvas
Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design
Mary Taylor
Gittell Collective, City University of New York
Discussant: Kristof Nagy, Princeton University, Kn2656@princeton.edu
LUNCH—12:45-1:45 pm – Hallway and Rooms
KEYNOTE — 1:45-2:45 pm Room 102
Keynote Film Presentation, Marina Petrovskaia, A Filmmaker’s Diary
Is it still possible to produce independent documentary films in Putin’s Russia? The war against Ukraine has irrevocably altered the political and social landscape, transforming Russia into an ultra-conservative, authoritarian, and aggressive nation. Filming there is very risky, but it remains essential for shedding light on the realities of life under these conditions. My unique situation allowed me to film in Russia during the last four years and return to the United States, where I have lived for the past 30 years: “Navigating a perilous political environment, a Russian-American filmmaker embarks on a daring documentary project, creating a “film diary” while traveling between her hometown of St. Petersburg, Russia, and the United States. Through nine vignettes, she explores the political climate in Russia, crisis and trauma, pushing the limits of what can be filmed while seeking to understand how many Russians truly support the war in Ukraine. The journey is both personal and political, offering a first-person perspective on the conflict and on the complexities of contemporary Russian society.” A Filmmaker’s Diary was featured at the 2024 VdR Film Market and is the first part of a triptych about Russia, followed by Viewpoints and I am not a Spy.
SESSION III — 2:45-4:30 pm
III.15 Russian-Jewish Literature on Three Continents
Jordan Center Conference Room
Chair: Mark Lipovetsky, Columbia University
Nadja Berkovich
Syracuse University
Ethnography of the People: Vladimir Bogoraz and Zora Neale Hurston
Edward Waysband
University of Pennsylvania
The ‘Levant’ in Russian-Jewish and Russian-Israeli Imaginaries
Yuliya Minkova
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Displaced Attachment and Trauma in Margarita Khemlin’s Short Stories
Alex Pekov
Columbia University
Across the Soviet Yiddishland: Russian, Polish and German Inflections in Katja Petrowskaja’s “Maybe Esther” and M. Gessen’s “Esther and Ruzya”
Discussant: Eliot Borenstein, NYU, eb7@nyu.edu
III.16 Perspectives on Contemporary Russia
Room 222
Chair: Kate Graney, Skidmore College
Indrapal Gurjar
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
Plausible Deniability as a Catalyst for Atrocity: A Case Study of Russian PMSC Operations in Ukraine
Maria Snegovaya
Georgetown University,
(Co-authored with Graeme Robertson and Peter Pomerantsev)
Priming Identity and War Support in Russia,
Galina Bogatova
NYU and Union College
Family as Empire: Household Role Conceptions and Authoritarian
Legitimation in Contemporary Russia
Discussant: Renata Mustafina, Harriman Institute, Columbia University, rm4177@columbia.edu
III.17 Historical Perspective Late Tsarist Period
Room 224
Chair: Michael Brinley, Princeton University
Luke Jeske
Auburn University
Civic Imperialism?: The Russian Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society,
1882-1917
Timur Saitov
SUNY Binghamton
Beyond Humanitarianism: Russian Civil War Refugee Polity in Istanbul
Maria Gomes
Princeton University
The Specter of Objectivity: The Parallel Ascent of the Laboratory and the Séance Room in Nineteenth-Century Russia
Ana Lolua
University of Pennsylvania
From Tsarist to Soviet: Nationalism, Ownership, and Nature and Cultures on Display in the Caucasus (1880's-1930's)
Discussant: Michael Brinley, Princeton University,
mb0604@princeton.edu
III.18 New Views on the Caucasus
Room 225
Chair: Busra Cicek, St. John’s University
Alp Demiroglu
Yale University
Oil Rocks: Fossil Socialism at Sea
Tamar Guchua
Akaki Tsereteli State University, Georgia
The Politics of Space: Orientational Metaphors in Georgian Political
Language
Discussant: Nareg Seferian, Independent
Scholar),naregseferian@yahoo.com
III.19 Impacts of the Russo-Ukraine War in Wider Perspective Room 228
Chair: Yeong-A Lee, MAIR, GSAS, NYU
Alina Ielisieieva
Independent Scholar
Remembering Ukraine: Migrant Identity and Retrospective
Self-Construction in Marina Lewycka’s Ukrainian-British Narrative
Anastasiia Pereverten
Harvard University
Communicating Ukraine: Political Advocacy, Public Engagement and
Message Framing in the United States
Lynn Patyk
Dartmouth University
TV Rain, TV Rights
Adam Wozniak
Harvard University
Populist Rhetoric and Policy: A Case Study of Co-optation in Polish
Politics
Discussant: Gia Mosashvili, NYU, giamosashvili@nyu.edu
III.20 Dance, Stage and Film in the Soviet Era
Room 229
Chair: Aristide LaVey, Harvard University and NYPL
Tatyana Carrillo
NYU
Broadcasting the Dancer on the Stage: How Maya Plisetskaya’s Balletic
Stardom Shaped the Filmed Archival of Carmen-Suite (1967) in the midst of the Cold War
Aidan Ward
NYU
Of Stage, Film, and Circus: Tracing the History of Soviet Tap Dance
Ilya Nemirovsky
Harvard University
Soviet “Warrior-Hamlets” in Theory and Practice
Eamon Maloney
Georgetown University
‘What Will We See When We Close Our Eyes’: The Soul in Julian
Antonisz’s Animation
Discussant: Bjorn Ingvoldstad, Bridgewater State University
bingvoldstad@bridgew.edu
III. 21. Discussion of Keynote Film Presentation
Marina Petrovskaia, A Filmmaker’s Diary
Room 102
SESSION IV – 4:45-6:30 pm
IV. 22. Preserving Threatened Identities Through Literature and Music Jordan Center Conference Room
Chair: Ian MacMillen, Yale University
Robert Coleman
Carnegie Mellon University
"A miracle will come:" Musical Life during the Holocaust in Belarus
Milo Clarkson
Macalester College,
Remembering the Sürgün: Tamirlar and Collective Memory in Crimean Tatar Oral Histories
Diego Benning Wang
Harvard University
The First Belarusian Book Printer and the First Soviet Literary Jubilee:
Francysk Skaryna and the Sovietization of Belarus, 1924-1925
Aizere Yessenkulova
Northwestern University in Qatar
Searching the Story: Kazakh Folklore
Discussant: Veronica Aplenc, University of Pennsylvania,
vaplenc@wharton.upenn.edu
IV. 23 Strategies and technologies of resistance in Russia and in exile Room 101
Chair: Olga Dovbysh, University of Helsinki
Olga Dovbysh
University of Helsinki
Between resistance and marketization: anti-censorship technologies in the RuN
Ekaterina Kurbangaleeva
ERES at George Washington University
Wartime Redistribution and Industrial Shifts in Russia
Svetlana Chuikina
Karlstadt University
“We Have More Than Fifty Chats and Use Three Platforms!” Telegram
and other alternatives as back-stage infrastructures of Russian anti-war
activism
Anna Nemzer
CEO, Kronika
“Everything’s Forever As Long As Someone Pays For It”
Discussant: Lynn Patyk, Dartmouth University,
Lynn.E.Patyk@dartmouth.edu
IV. 24. Negotiating Nation and Empire in the Soviet Era: Central Asia Room 222
Chair: Zeynep Dursun, Binghamton University
Nurlan Kabdylkhak
SUNY Stonybrook
Muslim Communities and Religious Policy in Early Soviet Kazakhstan, 1910s–1930s
Jessica Chen
Harvard University
The Horde c. 1935: USSR in Construction
Amir Karazhigitov
NYU
Between the Proletarian Internationalism and Nation-State: Kazakh
Nationalism in XX Century
Discussant: Timur Saitov, Binghamton University,
tsaitov1@binghamton.edu
IV.25 Frontiers of Language: Pedagogy and Technology
Room 224
Chair: Kate Graney, Skidmore College
Tamara Karakozova
University of Mississippi,
STARTALK 2025: Mississippi Edition
Sofia Melnychuck
Harvard University,
Leveraging the morphologically-rich structure of Lithuanian to improve large language model performance and boost AI equity
Discussant: Kate Graney, Skidmore College, kgraney@skidmore.edu
IV. 26 Perspectives on the Balkans
Room 225
Chair: Cristofer Scarboro, King’s College
Azam Zarchi
NYU,
Sniper Tourism and the Political Economy of War Crimes: Violence,
Profit, and Accountability in Post-War Bosnia
Mihaela Serban
Ramapo College of New Jersey
Judicial betrayal and democratic anxiety: second-order rule of law
mobilization in Romania
Nikolai Shatalin
Goethe University Frankfurt
“Constructing ‘Eternal Brotherhood’: The State Duma's Political
Weaponization of History during the Yugoslav Wars from 1991 to 1995
Discussant: Cristofer Scarboro, King’s College,
cristoferscarboro@kings.edu
IV. 27 Perspectives on the Soviet Era
Room 228
Chair: Philip Decker, Princeton University
Maksim Zakharov
NYU
Exporting Ideology: The Tudeh, the Iranian Revolution, and the
Negotiation of Soviet Theoretical Influence, 1978–1983
Rakhmetolla Zakarya
Harvard University
The formation and development of American-Soviet trade and economic relations in the 1920s and 1930s
Auriane Benabou
NYU
Scrapping Socialism: Tracing the History of Soviet Scrap Metal
Campaigns
Discussant: Randall Newnham, Penn State University, ren2@psu.edu
VI. 28. Indigenous Knowledge, Belief and Consciousness: New Readings from Siberia and the Far East
Room 229
Chair: Graham Weaver, New York University, gw1064@nyu.edu
Amy Adams
College of the Holy Cross
The (Re)Birth of Consciousness in Yuri Ryktheu’s “When the Whales Leave”: A Story for Our Time
Nataliya Karageorgos
Wesleyan University
Temporality in Yeremei Aipin’s Short Stories: The Khanty and the Soviet Oil Project in Siberia
Tatiana Filiminova
Dartmouth College
Subjugated Knowledges in the Indigenous Historical Novel: Zinaida Longortova’s Way from the Ob
Discussant: Melissa Chakars, Saint Joseph’s University,
Thank you for attending the 2026 NESEEES Conference! See you next year!
