New Book, New Blog: Russia’s Alien Nations



As some of you know, I spent a couple of years writing the first draft of “Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism” on my blog (plotsagainstrussia.org). Now that the book is coming out (from Cornell University Press, this March), I’m back to work on my next projects. And one of them is…another book whose rough draft will be posted on a blog.

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Anindita Banerjee speaks on Aelita, Queen of Mars in Radiant Futures keynote speech



On April 8, 2016, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia hosted a conference entitled “Radiant Futures: Russian Fantasy and Science Fiction.” After the first panel, NYU Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies Eliot Borenstein introduced keynote speaker Anindita Banerjee. “If we think of our conference and our field in terms of science fiction, then she is Queen of Mars, our Aelita,” Borenstein said. Banerjee, a professor of comparative literature at Cornell University, centered her talk on Aelita, Queen of Mars, a 1924 Soviet silent film directed by Yakov Protazanov based on Alexei Tolstoy’s eponymous novel.

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“Radiant Futures” conference brings Soviet science fiction and fantasy out of the periphery



On April 8, 2016, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia hosted a conference entitled “Radiant Futures: Russian Fantasy and Science Fiction.” The conference was convened by Eliot Borenstein, Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies and Collegiate Professor at New York University, and it featured a varied lineup of speakers from the literary field. In his introduction, Borenstein said that the idea behind the conference was to gather a group of people who have been thinking about nauchnaya fantastika (scientific fantasy) from a scholarly and non-scholarly perspective, particularly given the peripheral role this genre usually plays in the academic context.

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