Events in UCIS

Thursday, April 8 until Friday, April 8

8:00 am Conference
Georgia Consortium: Exploring the Complexities of Vietnam
Location:
Online via Zoom
Sponsored by:
Asian Studies Center
See Details

Register here.

Friday, February 25 until Saturday, February 26

(All day) Conference
GOSECA Annual Graduate Student Conference
Location:
Zoom
Sponsored by:
Center for Russian East European and Eurasian Studies along with Graduate Organisation for the Study of Europe and Central Asia
See Details

Friday, February 25th:
Keynote Speaker- 5 PM: Aneta Pavlenko, Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan, University of Oslo, Norway

Panel 1- 6:05 PM-7:35 PM: Language, culture, and identity in the former USSR
1. Arina Dmitrenko (University of Toronto): Empire and Urban Space: A Review of the Central Asian Space in the Russian Empire
2. Sean Nonnenmacher (University of Pittsburgh) & Emma Santelmann (University of Michigan): Reckoning with the past and negotiating a new linguistic future: Purist and moderate ideologies toward loanwords in post-Soviet Armenia
3. Timur Akishev (The University of Mississippi): Derussifying And Americanizing Northern Kazakhstan
Chair: Dr. Vladimir Padunov, University of Pittsburgh

Saturday, February 26th:
Panel 2- 11:00 AM-1:30 PM: Deconstructing the Social and the Political
1. Lukas Baake (London School of Economics): Failed deconstruction. The 1998 Crisis and the Russian Quest for Economic Reform
2. Nathan Rtishchev (New York University): The Gogol Center’s Battling Historiographies: The Twentieth Century Avant Garde’s Role in the Twenty First Century
3. Kevin Brown (University of Pittsburgh): The Crusade Against God: Bolshevism as a Secular Religion
4. Yana Lysenko (New York University): Deconstructing Post-Soviet Politics and Communal Life in the Soviet Dormitory: Symbolic Spatial Ruin in Yuri Bykov’s The Fool [Durak]
5. Mariam Shakhmuradyan (University of Cambridge): Archaeology as the Science of the Future. A Case Study: Archaeology of Armenia
Chair: Dr. Sean Guillory, University of Pittsburgh

Panel 3- 1:40 PM- 3:40 PM: Impact of Highly Skilled Migration on the Formation of New Concepts of Regionality and Geopolitical Perceptions
1. Anna Khotivrishvili: The impact of highly skilled migration on the formation of new geopolitical perceptions and concepts of regionality on the example of Georgia
2. Nicoleta-Florina Moraru: Exploring the Trajectories and Lessons of the New Russian Immigration Programme for HSM
3. Bibinaz Almanova: Educational And Highly Qualified Migrations’ Nexus: Key Trends And Approaches In Kazakhstan
4. Adam Israilov: Migration processes in the Chechen Republic and the role of highly skilled migration in 1991-1994.
Chair: Dr. Leila Delovarova, Kazakh National University

Panel 4- 4:00 PM-5:30 PM: Rethinking Balkan Identity
1. Joe Patrick (University of Pittsburgh): Constructing a Montenegrin Identity Online
2. Rexhina Ndoci (The Ohio State University): Linguistic difference as proxy for ethnic difference: The case of Albanian migrant memes
3. Patrick Gehringer (Oakland University) & Lindon Dedvukaj (Oakland University): Reevaluating Albanians Place in IE through a Historically Isolated Dialect
Chair: Dr. Ljiljana Đurašković, University of Pittsburgh

Panel 5- 5:35 PM-6:35 PM: Narratives at the Periphery
1. Fernando Alejandro Remache-Vinueza (The University of Glasgow):Changes and interactions between the mainstream narrative and alternative identities: The case of Lithuania
2. Catherine Mott (University of Kentucky): Lead Letters: An Unusual Window
Chair: Jamie Horowitz, University of Pittsburgh/GOSECA

6:40 PM: Closing Remarks

Friday, February 25

9:00 am Panel Discussion
War in Ukraine: Voices from Kyiv
Location:
Zoom
Sponsored by:
Center for Russian East European and Eurasian Studies along with Center for Governance and Markets and Kyiv School of Economics
See Details

The panel will feature two special guests:

Tymofiy Mylovanov, President at the Kyiv School of Economics, Former Minister of Economics in Ukraine, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh, and Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Governance and Markets

Nataliia Shapoval, Chair at the Kyiv School of Economics

The panel will be moderated by Professor Jennifer Murtazashvili.

Please register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_jrSul3T6RN6BnSlexTsG8A

12:00 pm Workshop
Anthologies as Early Modern Archives of Social History
Location:
Zoom
Sponsored by:
Center for Russian East European and Eurasian Studies along with Central Eurasian Studies Society and Consortium for Educational Resources on Islamic Studies (CERIS)
See Details

Assembling diverse materials ranging from poetry to stories, wills, personal and model letters, manuals, and other miscellanea, majmu'as or anthologies offer fresh insights for writing the history of the early modern Persianate world. Often produced outside the state and religious institutions, they provide a distinct vantage point to the social and cultural history of the communities that produced them. This workshop introduces the majmu'a and explores its capacity for driving scholarly insights through a hands-on exploration of a majmu'a collected by a family of bureaucrats living in seventeenth-century Isfahan.

INSTRUCTOR: Kathryn Babayan is Professor of Middle East Studies and History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her expertise lies in the medieval and early-modern Persianate world and focuses on the cultural, social and political histories of Iran, Iraq, Anatolia, and parts of Central Asia, Persian-speaking regions in which Islam was diversely “translated” in the processes of conversion. Professor Babayan's scholarship on the Irano-Islamic past has been inspired and broadly informed by critical innovations over the last three decades in the field of cultural studies, and ‘materialist’ modes of analysis that offer new historical approaches to the materiality of human lives as well as the remarkable range of evidentiary materials historians now employ. Her books include Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran (Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs, 2002) and City as Anthology: Eroticism and Urbanity in Early Modern Isfahan (Stanford UP, 2021).

MODERATOR: Sahar Hosseini, Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture
University of Pittsburgh

Registrations limited.

12:00 pm Colloquium
Placing Okinawa: A Look at the Short Stories of Medoruma Shun
Location:
Online via Zoom
Announced by:
Asian Studies Center on behalf of Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
See Details

Medoruma Shun is an Okinawan activist, writer, and second-generation survivor of The Battle of Okinawa. He garnered recognition for his writings when he received the Akutagawa Prize in 1997 for his short story Droplets. Many of his short stories include what has been dubbed ‘magic realism’ in which he introduces a hint of mysticism or a touch of the supernatural into stories that take place in the real world. As an activist, Shun speaks out against the many U.S. military bases that are scattered across the island of Okinawa and prevent the native people from utilizing their land and oceans. James Kotey is a second year IDMA student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. He received his bachelor’s degree in Japanese Language and Culture from Florida State University and served for five years in the United States Marine Corps. His research interests include translation and raising awareness for the U.S. base concerns in Okinawa.

To attend: click here

passcode: 515256

2:00 pm Lecture
(Post-)Pandemic Eurasia: Why Intersectionality Matters
Location:
Zoom
Sponsored by:
Center for Russian East European and Eurasian Studies along with Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies, University of Chicago, Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of Kansas, Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of Michigan, Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of Texas at Austin, Center for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Ohio State University, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center, Indiana University, Bloomington, Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
See Details

Join this panel to understand how the intersection of sexuality and gender, dis/ability, race and ethnicity, environmental politics, and urban development are shaping inequality in (post-)pandemic Eastern Europe and Russia.

MODERATOR:
Joan Neuberger, University of Texas at Austin

PRESENTERS:
Svetlana Borodina, Columbia University
Kateřina Kolářová, Charles University
Elana Resnick, University of California, Santa Barbara
Enikő Vincze, Babeș-Bolyai University

REGISTER IN ADVANCE: https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/crees/intersectionality-in-focus-spring-2022

3:00 pm Lecture
The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History
Location:
4217 Posvar Hall
Sponsored by:
Asian Studies Center
See Details

Join us as Dr. Ruth Mostern, Associate Professor in the Department of History and Director of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh, discusses her book, "The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History" in 4217 Posvar Hall.

4:00 pm Seminar
Negotiations and Love Songs: Composers' Relationship with the State Censor
Location:
Baker Hall 336 B, Carnegie Mellon University
Sponsored by:
Center for Russian East European and Eurasian Studies along with Department of History and Carnegie Mellon Department of History
5:00 pm Lecture
Multilingualism in Eastern Europe and Central Asia: A tour behind the scenes
Location:
Zoom
Sponsored by:
Center for Russian East European and Eurasian Studies along with Graduate Organisation for the Study of Europe and Central Asia
See Details

Anet a Pavlenko grew up in Kiev, Ukraine, and left the USSR just before it collapsed (a coincidence, not a consequence). After a short stay in a refugee settlement in Italy, she came to the United States
and, for reasons she is still trying to comprehend, decided to get a doctorate. While in graduate school, she supported herself and her son by working as an interpreter and case worker for the Refugee
Assistance Program in Ithaca, New York. She received her Ph.D. in General Linguistics at Cornell
University in 1997. Between 1998 and 2016 she was a Professor of Applied Linguistics at Temple
University, Philadelphia and in 2014-2015 she served as President of the American Association for
Applied Linguistics. From 2017 she has been a Research Professor at the Center for Multilingualism
at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her research focuses on the relationship between multilingualism,
cognition, and emotions; forensic linguistics; and language management in imperial Russia, the USSR
and post-Soviet states. She has authored more than a hundred articles and ten books, has lectured
widely in North America, Europe and Asia and is the winner of the 2006 BAAL Book of the Year
award, the 2009 TESOL Award for Distinguished Research and the 2021 AAAL Research Article award.

5:00 pm Cultural Event
Slovak Tutoring and Conversation Table
Sponsored by:
Center for Russian East European and Eurasian Studies