Patricia Guy, a Diplomat in Residence for the State Department, will visit the University of Pittsburgh to talk about the State Department’s internship program, and will provide information and answer questions about careers and job possibilities with the Department of state.

Despite a half century of rapid, state-sponsored industrialization in the region, only with its more recent, abrupt exposure to global capitalism has Siberia become a hotly contested site of debates over both indigenous rights and natural resource extraction. The Sakha Republic (Yakutia), a Northeastern Siberian region twice the size of Alaska, is now a particularly crucial site of contestation, boasting diamond reserves that produce about 25% of the world‘s diamonds.

On January 27, 1942, Pravda carried the latest in a series of articles about female partisans who had been captured, tortured, and executed by German forces during the offensive on Moscow in 1941. Accompanying that day’s article, “Tanya” by Petr Lidov, was a harrowing photograph of the partisan’s exhumed body, with the noose still around her neck and clear signs of mutilation on her exposed breasts. The striking beauty of the executed woman, along with the uncomfortable eroticism of the image, made the photograph one of the most memorable of the war.

This presentation analyzes the terrific results of politically engineering cataclysm organized by one the most cruel dictators in the world – Joseph Stalin, in his war against Ukrainians – the biggest national minority in Soviet Union. With this lecture Dr. Davydenko wants to pay tribute to the millions of victims of Great Famine (also known as Holodomor). Soviet authorities succeeded in carefully hiding the fact of the famine and destroyed the 1932-1933 archives but could not erase it from the memories of Ukrainians who survived.

In the mid-1920s, the Bolshevik Party and the Young Communist League were increasingly concerned about expressions of depression and pessimism among Soviet youth. Young people fretted about the perils of the “humdrum life” as they sought to find place and solace in the post-revolutionary order. Many critics then and historians since have pointed to this wave of depression as indicative of youth’s dissatisfaction with the New Economic Policy and a yearning for revolution renewed.

Elizabeth Wood is Professor of Russian and Soviet History at MIT where she has taught since 1990. A specialist in Soviet and Russian gender relations and performance issues, she is the author of two monographs, From Baba to Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Indiana University Press, 1997) and Performing Justice: Agitation Trials in Early Soviet Russia (Cornell University Press, 2005). Her current work centers on the performance of power under Vladimir Putin in Russia today.

With responses by Barbara McCloskey (History of Art and Architecture) and David Pettersen (French).

Faculty and graduate students in Pitt Humanities departments can access readings for colloquia by logging in to , clicking on the tab “My Resources,” clicking on “Humanities Center,” and then clicking on “Colloquium Series” where there is a link to the pdf files. Anyone else wishing to access the readings may request the reading at humctr@pitt.edu.

Dr. Venuti will give a seminar focusing on different ways of thinking about translation, using theory and examples of translations between English and other languages. He will focus on particular texts and ways to teach them, again, to students without strong second language skills. Amani Attia (Arabic Coordinator), Lina Insana (Associate Professor of Italian), and Gina Peirce (Assistant Director of Russian and East European Studies) will also speak at this workshop.

For seminar materials, contact: Carol M. Bové.

Mr. Dimiter Kenarov will present a lecture that focuses on shale gas in Poland and Europe which will be live videoconferenced with the European Union Center of Excellence at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.