Past Events

Christmas 1944. Soviet soldiers invaded Hungary and dragged every young ethnic German woman away from a small village and transport them to a Soviet labour camp where they are forced to work in the coal mines under inhuman conditions. This is where Irén meets fellow prisoner Rajmund who decides to teach her how to survive. While she is determined to return home to her little daughter and family, history and fate have a different plan: Irén and Rajmund fall in love. Based on a true story. “Eternal Winter” is the very first feature film about the 700,000 Hungarian victims of the Soviet labour camps whose stories remained untold for over 70 years. COUNTRY: Hungary (2018)
DIRECTOR: Attila Szász Harris Theater (Pittsburgh Cultural Trust)
809 Liberty Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15206 Get Tickets Here: https://trustarts.org/production/84756 PROMO CODE for discounted tickets: EUPITT (* Pitt Students, Staff and Faculty Only)

Environmental history and nature-writing have captured both scholarly and public interest as evidenced by the number as well as the quality of recent publications. The proliferation is doubtlessly the result of the urgency of the climate crisis and environmental destruction and social, political, and cultural anxieties stemming from them. Within the academy especially, research on environmental history is flourishing; scholars have been examining new themes and possibilities for studying environmental change and its complex entanglements with the human world. In the last several years, scholars have expanded the scope of environmental research, which now ranges from narratives centering on various environments and topographies such as rivers or permafrost to animal farming in the context of twentieth-century politics and the role of technology such as photography in making nature an important part of colonialist discourse. This symposium aims to gather scholars whose work touches on different aspects of the cultural and social history of the environment in Southeast and East Europe and the Middle East. Broadly conceived, the region forms a part of the former Ottoman domains and the historical treatment of the region has been overwhelmingly through the lens of political history and top-down approaches. In recent years, though, a number of historians embraced environmental approaches, producing in turn excellent studies on a range of topics, from climate history and its impact on societies to empire and resource management, particularly of water. Inspired by this scholarship, the symposium seeks to emphasize the environment as a powerful discursive force at the intersection of cultural, religious, and intellectual history. Therefore, its core concern is to explore and formulate new questions, themes, and approaches regarding the role of the environment in shaping different imaginaries as well as modes of belonging and identity, of history and cultural and political categories and hierarchies.

This 4:30 to 5:30 pm webinar (free and open to anyone who registers here) will focus on professions relating to and/or affected by U.S.-Russian relations and will highlight how graduates of Northeast U.S. institutions have navigated the start to their careers in the geopolitically troubled times of the past few years and of the Cold War’s escalation in the early 1980s. Our panel will feature recent graduates as well as the Honorable Roman Popadiuk, first U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, who entered the Foreign Service in 1981 after completing his advanced degrees at the CUNY Graduate Center. This is a referred event.

The Foreign Language & Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship program is a prestigious and competitive award that allows select Pitt undergraduate and graduate students to devote full-time attention to their chosen modern foreign language and area studies specialty. There are separate competitions for the Academic Year FLAS Fellowship and the Summer FLAS Fellowship. Attend this info session with representatives from the Asian Studies Center, Center for African Studies, Center for Latin American Studies, Global Studies Center, European Studies Center, and the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Center to learn more about the requirements and how to submit a strong application.

A LIVE INTERVIEW WITH Alex Dombrovski, University of Pittsburgh AND Carmen Andreescu, University of Pittsburgh REEES Fall 2022 series, The Specter in the Present: Trauma and its Legacies in Eurasia, will explore the place of trauma in Eurasia society in four interviews that pair scholars to discuss social and clinical trauma, victimhood, historical memory, and the politics of history in the region. This event is part of a larger series

The University of Pittsburgh's Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies is proud to sponsor the 9th edition of the RFF titled Homelands. This year's festival reflects on current events, while celebrating the power of film to map out new meanings into a world where people have been displaced by wars, economic crises, political instability, and natural disasters. Internationally acclaimed movies featured in a carefully curated selection, covering all forms and genres, as well as film-related events with special guests, will redefine the sense of homeland and belonging, in relation to our families, neighbors, countries of origin, and, by extension, to our planet itself. Films will be screened online with free tickets provided to Pitt faculty and students. More information to be announced.

Szczecin is well-suited to analyze urban representation in public discourses and heritage debates. Its transnational history between Germany and Poland, its border shifts after WWII, and the access to the Baltic Sea inform and shape these debates to this day. In her research, Tabitha Redepenning explores urban authenticity. She takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on urban studies, cultures of remembrance, public history, and tourism theory.
Focusing on post-war discussions about specific buildings’ de- or reconstruction, Tabitha highlights the connections between urban structures through overarching narratives in tourist trails. Diverse local actors structure the city space along the linear narrative of the trails while simultaneously creating a particular city image. Tabitha Redepenning studied book science, German studies, and European studies in Mainz, Frankfurt (Oder), and Wrocław. Her Master’s degree was in "Entangled cultures of remembrance in the German-Polish context on the example of the remembrance of Auschwitz liberation." She worked as an Educational Project Specialist at the Krzyżowa Foundation for Mutual Understanding in Europe. Since June 2020, she has been a research associate and Ph.D. student at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe and a contributor to the project “Urban Authenticity: Creating, Contesting, and Visualizing the built Heritage in European Cities since the 1970s.”