Upcoming Events
COVID-19 Response
COVID-19 Response: Learn how the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies is working under the current operational posture at ucis.pitt.edu/creees/covid.

- Maria Lotsmanova
- 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
- 4130 Posvar Hall
Maria Lotsmanova, former head of the document center of the GULAG History Museum, will present two short screenings: a four minute documentary on the Gulag History Museum and an eleven minute documentary short on her family history (with subtitles).
Maria Lotsmanova has until recently worked at Moscow’s Museum of Soviet Repressions (the GULAG History Museum, 2021 Winner of the Council of Europe Museum Prize), where she would run the Document Center that consults with visitors and gives regular seminars on how to find information in archives about people who were persecuted and convicted during the mass repression in the USSR. She would conduct research for museum exhibitions, publishing projects, museum storage practices and represent the Center at external venues. Her other professional interests include documentary filmmaking and photography, green activism, and sustainability projects. In 2022 Maria moved to Pittsburgh where she currently works as a gallery associate at the Carnegie Museum of Art.

- Ambassador Norman Eisen
- 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
- Teplitz Memorial Moot Courtroom
Ambassador (ret.) Norman Eisen is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings
Institution and a CNN Legal Analyst. At Brookings, he chairs the institution’s signature anticorruption
program, Leveraging Transparency to Reduce Corruption, and is the founder and
lead editor of the Brookings Russia Sanctions Tracker. He represents Brookings as the civil
society co-chair of the Financial Transparency and Integrity cohort for the Biden
administration’s second Summit for Democracy and co-chairs the Transatlantic Democracy
Working Group. Eisen is the co-author of the Democracy Playbook, which situates anticorruption
in the broader pro-democracy framework. Eisen frequently publishes on topics
relating to Ukraine and its reconstruction.

- Dr. Volodymyr Dubovyk
- 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
- 4130 Posvar
The start of Russia's war in Ukraine in 2014 has impacted regional security in the Black Sea through the occupation of Crimea. The massive invasion of 2022 has led to even more profound implications. Yet, Russia has failed to convert the control of Ukrainian territories into lasting strategic advantages. The recent liberation of Kherson and fear in Moscow that Ukraine might go into Crimea indicate a shift in the situation. The talk will shed light on the humanitarian impact of war, the disruption of global trade, and the larger security implication for the Black Sea region and Europe, more broadly. Volodymyr Dubovyk is Associate Professor at the Department of International Studies, Odesa I. I. Mechnikov National University in Ukraine. He has conducted research at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1997, 2006-2007) and the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland (2002), taught at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2013 as well as at St. Edwards University and the University of Texas in 2016-17. He is the co-author of Ukraine and European Security (Macmillan, 1999) and has published numerous articles on US-Ukraine relations, regional and international security, and Ukraine's foreign policy.

- Dr. Volodymyr Dubovyk
- 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
- 4130 Posvar
The start of Russia's war in Ukraine in 2014 has impacted regional security in the Black Sea through the occupation of Crimea. The massive invasion of 2022 has led to even more profound implications. Yet, Russia has failed to convert the control of Ukrainian territories into lasting strategic advantages. The recent liberation of Kherson and fear in Moscow that Ukraine might go into Crimea indicate a shift in the situation. The talk will shed light on the humanitarian impact of war, the disruption of global trade, and the larger security implication for the Black Sea region and Europe, more broadly.
Volodymyr Dubovyk is Associate Professor at the Department of International Studies, Odesa I. I. Mechnikov National University in Ukraine. He has conducted research at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1997, 2006-2007) and the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland (2002), taught at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2013 as well as at St. Edwards University and the University of Texas in 2016-17. He is the co-author of Ukraine and European Security (Macmillan, 1999) and has published numerous articles on US-Ukraine relations, regional and international security, and Ukraine's foreign policy.

- Various
- (All day)
The revolutionary prospect of socialism inspired homosexual emancipation and the growth of toleration toward same-sex relations in the first quarter of the twentieth century in many countries, including the UK, US, Hungary, and USSR. However, the development of LGBTQ+ rights within socialism was never linear and even. The conference seeks to address those discrepancies and the reasoning behind them. It aims to discuss the LGBTQ+ experience and its political, social, and cultural implications under state socialism from a global perspective. What was the place of queerness under socialism? Was socialist ideology generally more responsive to queer people’s agenda and empathic towards them? How did legislation relate to same-sex activity change over time in socialist countries? How did the Cold War and geopolitical tensions between socialist and capitalist counties influence and inform sexual politics toward queer people and their perception? Why did some socialist countries, such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, and the GDR decriminalize homosexuality as early as the 1960s and the Polish People’s Republic never criminalize it? What strategies of networking and concealment did sexual and gender non-conformists adopt in the socialist countries where homosexuality was still illegal, such as Soviet Republics, China, and Cuba? What was the attitude towards gender and sexual dissidents among the left-leaning movements in capitalist countries? Why decriminalization of homosexuality and homosexual emancipation that followed it was subsequently cut off in some post-socialist countries such as Russia? The main goal of the symposium is to reflect on the broad spectrum of topics related to the conjunction of queer and socialist ideology from a global and comparative perspective. The symposium aims at the broader public, including students, scholars, and activists.

- Katarzyna Gorak-Sosnowska, Botakoz Kassymbekova, Iryna Sklokina, Vitaly Chernetsky
- 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm
- Zoom
Discourse and Decolonization: Perspectives from Outside the Anglophone Academy is the second panel of the Decolonization in Focus Series. The Russian war in Ukraine has had innumerable impacts, from the personal to the political, local, national and global. One of the many sea changes wrought by the war has been the reckoning within Slavic/Russian & Eurasian Studies over the outsized role Russia has played and continues to play in the field and what could and should be done about it. The invited panelists in this series will consider the relationships of power that have long dominated the region, how they have impacted the field of study, and what, if anything, could and should be done about it. The series has six wide-ranging panels featuring speakers from various disciplines and institutions. Panelists and participants will be encouraged to consider why decolonizing Russian & Eurasian studies matters, how to implement concrete change in their classrooms, and how to conceive of the future of expertise within the field. All sessions will be convened using Zoom, live-streamed via YouTube, and recorded to be made available for later viewing.

- Kaija E. Schilde
- 4:00 pm
- Zoom
Kaija E. Schilde
Jean Monnet Chair of European Security
Associate Professor, Pardee School of Global Studies
Director, Center for the Study of Europe
Project on the Political Economy of Security
Pardee School Initiative on Forced Migration and Human Trafficking
The EU is a non-unitary security state of international significance and is threat responsive to challenges to its interests. It has become a security state through a combination of incremental institutional layering and shifts in international threat, primarily the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and intervention in Eastern Ukraine, and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The security studies debate on European strategic autonomy has so far ignored and dismissed the infrastructural power of the EU. The EU’s infrastructural power comes from regulatory, monetary and market instruments, and a nascent but increasing direct procurement of military materiel. EU infrastructural power complicates EU-related state formation theory debates. Traditional security states extract resources from their society, directly tax their populations, and have formal authority to generate military capability. Historically, the EU has done none of these things. Scholars using the conventional lens of state security authority have concluded that the EU is not yet a security state, because it does not tax and spend to generate military capacity on its own (Kelemen & McNamara, 2022). However, this misdiagnoses the sources of infrastructural security power in the 21st century, and only compares the political development of the EU to the generation of military power in earlier centuries. Moreover, this position fails to consider the comparative: how do contemporary non-EU states generate military capacity? To what are we comparing EU state formation? I theorize a broader definition of security state to align with 21st Century generation of military power and evaluates the shifts in EU infrastructural power in light of changes.
Prior Title: EU Defense Cooperation and the War in Ukraine

- Ana Bakić
- 7:00 pm to 8:00 pm
- White Whale Bookstore

- Various
- 8:30 am to 5:00 pm
Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia are often conceptualized as a single geopolitical unit. The 21st century has challenged these conceptions due to breakthroughs in technology and medicine, new regional conflicts, and the continuing effects of globalization. These transformations have molded individuals, nations, cultures, languages, and disciplines, provoking questions of identity. For our platinum conference GOSECA invites presentations exploring identity today.

- Karolina Koziura, Mariia Shynkarenko, Amanda Zadorian, Jessica Pisano
- 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm
- Zoom
Emerging Scholars on the State of the Field, Activism, and Advocacy is the third panel in the Decolonization in Focus Series. The Russian war in Ukraine has had innumerable impacts, from personal to political, local, national, and global. One of the many sea changes wrought by the war has been the reckoning within Slavic/Russian & Eurasian Studies over the outsized role Russia has played and continues to play in the field and what could and should be done about it. The invited panelists in this series will consider the relationships of power that have long dominated the region, how they have impacted the field of study, and what, if anything, could and should be done about it. The series will consist of six wide-ranging panels featuring speakers from a variety of disciplines and institutions. Panelists and participants will be encouraged to consider why decolonizing Russian & Eurasian studies matters, how to implement concrete change in their classrooms, and how to conceive of the future of expertise within the field. All sessions will be convened using Zoom, live-streamed via YouTube, and recorded to be made available for later viewing.

- 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
- Global Hub

- Dr. Sunnie Rucker-Chang
- 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
- Hybrid
On ‘Decentering’ and Reimagining Slavic and East European Studies from the Periphery” will be delivered by Sunnie Rucker-Chang, Associate Professor at the Department of Slavic and East European Studies at Ohio State University. Dr. Sunnie Rucker-Chang writes on racial and cultural formations, minority-majority and minority-minority relations in Southeast Europe. Her work has appeared in Critical Romani Studies, EuropeNow! - A Journal of Research and Art, Interventions: Journal of Post-Colonial Studies, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, Slavic and East European Journal, and Slavic Review. She is currently finishing a monograph examining the politics of Blackness in former Yugoslav states that challenges conventional ideas of race and racialization in the Balkans and connects the region to broader trends in European Studies.
This is a hybrid event.

- 12:00 pm to 4:00 pm
- Global Hub
Learn the history of Mărțișor and join the members of the Romanian Room committee to make your own and for your friends. Learn more about this Romanian tradition which falls on March 1 of every year during which the gifting of a red and white string attached to a small piece of jewelry or a flower is believed to bring health and luck to the wearer. Learn about mărțișoare and making them. You will also be able to purchase authentic mărțișoare, Romanian pastries, enjoy an exhibition of traditional Romanian costumes and shirts, and connect with members of the Romanian Room Committee.

- Oxana Shevel
- 4:00 pm
- Zoom
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