On September 29th, Maria Vinogradova, a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Pratt Institute, came to discuss and impart her expertise surrounding the role of guns on film in the culture of the Soviet Union.
Continue reading...Film Editing as Women’s Work: Esfir Shub, Elizaveta Svilova, and the Culture of Soviet Montage
Aron Ouzilevski
Philippa Hetherington explores anti-trafficking rhetoric in a Soviet and global context
Ilaria Parogni
On April 22, 2016, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia welcomed Philippa Hetherington from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London for a session of the Spring 2016 Colloquium Series. The event, titled “Between Moscow, Geneva and Shanghai: the Traffic in Women of Russian Origin and the League of Nations’ Global Governmentalities, 1920-1937,” gave Hetherington the opportunity to discuss a paper devoted to the interaction between the League of Nations and the lives of Russian and Soviet female migrants in the interwar period. In many cases, this relationship led to anti-trafficking campaigns in order to rescue women of Russian origin engaged in prostitution in China.
Continue reading...Sovietizing Russian Ballet in Co-Produced Cold War Films: Two Scenes
Natasha Bluth
Robert Crews revisits Afghan history in a global context
Ilaria Parogni
On Wednesday, March 9, 2016, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia welcomed Robert Crews, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University for a book talk devoted to his recent book, Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation. The event focused on Afghan encounters with Russia, the USSR, and Central Asia and explored Afghanistan’s engagement with the global circulation of modern politics.
Soviet Involvement in the Creation of the State of Israel: The Secret Diaries of Ivan Maisky, Stalin’s Wartime Ambassador in London
Natasha Bluth
Experts discuss Russian law and its trajectories
Anastassia Kostrioukova
On October 16, 2014, the Jordan Center welcomed several scholars to participate in a panel, entitled Russia’s Legal Trajectories: Law in Action and Question, 1830 to 2014. In her introductory remarks, Professor of History at NYU Jane Burbank stated that there are many perplexing ideas about law and Russia. Some commentators think that the rule of law is incompatible with autocratic or Communist governments; for them Russian law is an oxymoron. Yet, Burbank remarked, law has been important to government in Russia for many centuries. In addition, for the last 10 year or so many scholars have been rigorously scrutinizing the subject. This panel was meant to give its audience “a taste of new legal history” in four different presentations about law from the early 19th century, through the legal reforms of 1864, to the current day.
“Those crazy Americans, of course Pushkin’s not black!”
Elizabeth (Betty) BanksLast Friday, a group of scholars gathered in the wonderful space of NYU’s newly established Africa house to discuss connections of various forms between Russian and Africa.
We were a notably eclectic collective, including a Nigerian professor who studied in the USSR, the daughter of a Russian woman and an Angolan man who was born in Soviet Uzbekistan, an American historian of Russia married to an Africanist, a young scholar working on a book manuscript about the Soviet Afro-Asian writers’ organisation, a historian of African interested in global expression of blackness, a documentary film maker, and a early-stage graduate student perhaps feeling her way to a Russian-African topic.
