Robert Bird discusses female subjectivity in socialist realist film



On December 11, 2015, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia welcomed Robert Bird for a colloquium entitled, “Synchrony and Matriarchy: Documenting Female Subjectivity in Dziga Vertov and Elizaveta Svilova’s documentary The Three Heroines (1939).” The talk focused on Vertov’s final independent film before World War II, which completed a trilogy of films about women in the USSR. Bird, an Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, discussed female subjectivity in the context of socialist realism and the Stalinist era, drawing on a portion of his upcoming book manuscript about socialist realism as a model from 1932 to 1941.

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Re-Mediating the Archive: Scholars discuss archival revolutions


On April 24th, 2015, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, together with the university’s Department of Comparative Literature, the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, the Office of the Dean for Humanities, as well as the Romanian Cultural Institute inNew York, held an all-day symposium entitled “Re-Mediating the Archive: Image, Word, Performance” organized by NYU’s PhD candidate in Comparative Literature Emma Hamilton and Professor of Comparative Literature Cristina Vatulescu. The symposium welcomed seven participants from various fields who, as Vatulescu pointed out in her introduction, were there to address “the coming together of texts, images, and bodies in the archive.” She also added that currently “archival re-mediation is in full swing,” with new scholarship posing the question of the role of media and images in the long textually-dominated archive and attempting to bring other media out of persistent blind spots. She referred to this recent development as a new archival revolution, and invited dialogue with other archival revolutions, such as that prompted by the emergence of film as a medium at the turn of the 20th century and the one following the fall of the Iron Curtain 25 years ago.

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Stephen Norris discusses Boris Efimov and Soviet cartoons


On October 10, 2014, the Jordan Center welcomed Stephen Norris, a professor of history at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University of Ohio, to speak about his book project, entitled “Communist Cartoonist: Boris Efimov.” Norris’s talk was second in the Jordan Center’s Colloquium Series, which, as Director Yanni Kotsonis explained, encourages scholars to present their ongoing projects in order to receive feedback and comments from the audience.

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