Join the African Studies Program as we welcome in the new academic year with our annual welcome reception! Meet staff, affiliated faculty and fellow students and discuss the program, events for the year and opportunities for engagement!

The Chernobyl disaster immediately comes to mind when we think of the Soviet nuclear industry. What about the history of Soviet nuclear power in the four decades prior? This live interview with Sonja Schmid will explore the development of the Soviet nuclear industry from the 1950s to Chernobyl to shed light on its institutional, technological, social, and political development.

This event is a part of the REEES Fall Speaker Series "Nuclear Fallout: Science and Society in Eurasia"

Professor Chantal Bouchard from McGill University in Montreal will offer a lecture in French on language use in Quebec today.

Natalia Aleksiun is Professor of Modern Jewish History at Touro College, Graduate School of Jewish Studies, New York. She studied East European and Jewish history in Poland, where she received her first doctoral degree in history at Warsaw University, with a dissertation that resulted in her first book, “Where to? The Zionist Movement in Poland, 1944-1950.” She received her second doctoral degree in Jewish studies at New York University.

Dr. Aleksiun has been a fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, Germany; the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania; a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, Vienna; a Yad Hanadiv Postdoctoral Fellow in Israel; Pearl Resnick Postdoctoral Fellow, at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, USHMM, Washington D.C., and the Imre Kertesz Kolleg in Jena, Germany.

She has published in Yad Vashem Studies, Polish Review, Dapim, East European Jewish Affairs, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Polin, and Gal Ed, and other journals. Her second book, “Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust” is forthcoming (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2019). She co-edited two volumes of Polin, (v. 20, devoted to the memory of the Holocaust, and v. 29, on Jewish historiography in Eastern Europe). Aleksiun is currently working on a book about the cadaver affair at European universities in the 1920s and 1930s and on a project dealing with daily lives of Jews in hiding in Galicia during the Holocaust.

Join us for an evening of language and cultural exchange between Pitt students and International students.