Past Events

The presentation discusses the role of local public libraries in shaping memory about the Great Patriotic War in Russia today. With a particular focus on the Northwest of Russia, it will demonstrate how local libraries practice an emotional approach to commemoration, building close connections with their audiences through the feelings and personal histories they convey by means of material objects. Rendering local public libraries as powerful memory influencers in the region, the presentation will show their contribution to promoting local patriotism and remembering the militarized past. Elena Kochetkova is currently an Associate Professor of Modern European Economic History at the Department of Archeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion at the University of Bergen. She is the author of the monograph "The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology" (MIT Press, 2024). She is currently working on a monograph on food modernity under state socialism. She is also working within the project "'Memory Politics of the North, 1993-2023", funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

Dr. John Palka is a retired professor of biology at the University of Washington with a specialty in neuroscience. He is the winner of numerous prestigious academic awards, including election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, two Fulbright Fellowships for teaching in India, and a Guggenheim Fellowship for research in Cambridge, England. He also co-founded and co-directed the University of Washington's highly lauded Program on the Environment. A two-time refugee from his Slovak homeland- in 1939 from the Nazis and in 1949 from the Communists- Dr. Palka has retained his love for Slovakia and his fluency in the Slovak language. Over the years he has visited his family in Slovakia often. These experiences inspired his research into the role that many generations of his family played in the national life of Slovakia, laying the foundation for his book My Slovakia, My Family: One Family's Role in the Birth of a Nation.

Attention: Undergraduate students! Are you looking to gain experience that will help prepare you for a globally-connected job market? Stop by Drop-In Hours to learn more about getting the Global Distinction added to your academic transcript, receiving special recognition at graduation, and standing out to prospective employers!

Stop by the Global Hub to learn more about financial wellness!

Please note a change of time:
Keynote Speaker for the Undergraduate Research Symposium: The Discussion will explore one of the means by which primarily young people in West Germany attempted to “revolutionize” everyday life and beyond, through new, explicitly political forms of cohabitation designated Wohngemeinschaften (WGs). WGs served as critical hubs of more conventional popular politics of the era, but also housed intense experiments in remaking the self and relations with others, transcending the nuclear family and the centrality of the couples relationship, and working through ideas and convictions across populations often conceived as incompatible. Part of broader efforts to remake German society from the bottom up, these experiments mark one site of successful youth efforts to transform the world around them. About the Speaker:
Belinda Davis is a professor of history at Rutgers University and director of the Rutgers Center for European Studies. She is author or co-editor of five books, including the coedited Social Movements After ’68: Selves and Solidarities in West Germany and Beyond (2022); The Internal Life of Politics: Extraparliamentary Opposition in West Germany, 1962-1983 (forthcoming with Cambridge). She is currently completing work on Voices of the Organized Poor: Learning from the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign’s Everyday Struggles for Survival and Alternative Futures; and working on an environmental history of modern Europe for Cambridge University Press. She is a member of the Rutgers team participating in the Jean Monnet-funded ValEUs grant, of which the University of Pittsburgh is also a consortium member.

The European and Eurasian Undergraduate Research Symposium is an annual event since 2002 designed to provide undergraduate students, from the University of Pittsburgh and other colleges and universities, with advanced research experiences and opportunities to develop presentation skills. The event is open to undergraduates from all majors and institutions who have written a research paper from a social science, humanities, or business perspective focusing on the study of Eastern, Western, or Central Europe, the European Union, Russia, or Central Eurasia. After the initial submission of papers, selected participants are grouped into panels according to their research topics. The participants then give 10- to 15-minute presentations based on their research to a panel of faculty and graduate students. The presentations are open to the public. SYMPOSIUM: Friday, March 28, 2025 APPLICATION DEADLINE: Friday, January 10, 2025 https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/creees/urs QUESTIONS? Contact Zita Tóth-Shawgo SPONSORS
Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Consortium for Educational Resources on Islamic Studies
European Studies Center
University Center for International Studies
Graduate Organization for the Study of Europe and Central Asia
Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently predicted that global average temperatures will rise 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels in the mid-2030s. Over the last decades, a global network of scholars, policy makers, activists, and others have organized to offer ways to mitigate and even reverse the effects of climate change. What offramps can these solutions and movements offer our collective humanity? “Eurasian Environments” seeks to provide some reflections to mark the UN’s 2024 Climate Change Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. This series will examine social justice and sustainability efforts to address climate change by putting scholars of Eurasia in conversation with their peers specializing on Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The series will comprise six events that will illuminate the challenges and possible solutions to climate change in Eurasia in regional and global contexts. This event is part of the Eurasian Environments: Climate Justice and Sustainability in Global Context series.