Lecture

Integrating languages and cultures across the curriculum is an innovative approach that fosters a holistic educational experience. By intertwining diverse linguistic and cultural elements into various subjects, students gain a deeper understanding of cultural competence and global perspectives relevant to their disciplines. This method not only enhances language proficiency but also promotes empathy, cross-cultural communication, and a nuanced appreciation for the rich tapestry of human expression.

In this talk, Robin Visser will speak about her new book, Questioning Borders: Ecoliterature of China and Taiwan. Published by Columbia University Press in 2023, the book engages with the intersection of ethnic minorities and environmental studies in modern China from a comparative, interdisciplinary, and global context. Lunch provided.
This event is sponsored by the Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research, Global Studies in the History Department, the Environmental Humanities Research Seminar, and the Humanities Scholars Program.

Dr. Taras Filenko is newly returned from Ukraine and the surrounding region, where Ukrainian refugees have sought shelter from the Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022. Come hear an in-person eyewitness account from someone with a lifelong network of family, friends, and colleagues, many who are displaced from their homes to locations inside Ukraine and abroad.

What hope is there for victory? Is US support waning? What kinds of help are most valuable at this moment? What is the life of students during war?

Sasha Senderovich will discuss his new book, "How the Soviet Jew Was Made", which offers a close reading of postrevolutionary Yiddish and Russian-language literature and film that recasts the Soviet Jew as a novel cultural figure: an ambivalent character navigating between the Jewish past and Bolshevik modernity. Senderovich urges us to see the Soviet Jew anew, as not only a member of a minority group, but also a particular kind of liminal being.

Andrei Muraru was appointed as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Romania to the United States on July 7, 2021. Ambassador Muraru has held positions at the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile (IICCMER); the Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Romania and was also personal advisor to the General Director of the National Archives of Romania (CNSAS). Ambassaro Muraru was a member of the Administrative Board of the Romanian Television.

Dr. Kseniia Minakova is an Associate Professor of Physics, Leader Researcher in Optics & Photonics Laboratory and Deputy Chair of the Admissions Committee at the National Technical University “Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute”. In 2023 she was named Optica Ambassador. Dr. Minakova received her Ph.D in Solid State Physics from the Institute of Electrophysics & Radiation Technologies National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and the Master’s degree in Theoretical Physics from the V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University.

This lecture considers the problem of the cultural value of political mystifications, forgeries, and appropriations. In doing so, I will focus on the historical and ideological contexts (in particular, the role of the Communist International in Moscow) of one of the most popular “songs of protest,” which was published by the American folklorist and pro-Communist activist from a Jewish-Hungarian family Lawrence Gellert’s (1898-1979) in his influential collection of African-American political songs (1936).