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.

Saturday, February 26 until Thursday, March 31

(All day) Cultural Event
Mărțișor 2022
Location:
Nationality Rooms and Intercultural Exchange Programs - Mărțișor 2022 website
Sponsored by:
Nationality Rooms and Intercultural Exchange Programs along with Romanian Nationality Room Committee
See Details

Learn the history of mărțișor and watch the Romanian Room committee make them and talk about this old tradition.

Falling on March 1 of every year, Mărțișor is an old Romanian tradition of gifting a red and white string attached to a small piece of jewelry or a flower. This is believed to bring health and luck to the wearer.

Monday, February 28 until Friday, March 4

(All day) Exhibit
Genesis: An Exhibition of Latinx, Black, and Indigenous Art
Location:
Global Hub - 1st Floor Posvar
Sponsored by:
Center for African Studies, Center for Latin American Studies, Global Studies Center and Global Hub
See Details

The University of Pittsburgh's Global Hub, along with the Center for Latin American Studies, Global Studies Center, and Center for African Studies, is hosting art exhibition to showcase Latinx, Indigenous, and Black art. The exhibition will be displayed in the Global Hub from February 28th to March 4th, with a special evening of performances to honor International Women's Day on March 3rd from 7-10PM.

Friday, March 4

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 Information Session
East Africa Program Info Session
Location:
Zoom
Sponsored by:
Center for African Studies along with Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA)
See Details

Are you a graduate student looking for a research opportunity or internship abroad? The East Africa Field Based Program is right for you! Learn about the program and the various organizations you can work with in Uganda or Kenya this summer.

12:00 pm Colloquium
Reconstitution: Trauma and Memory in East Asian Democratization Narratives
Sponsored by:
Asian Studies Center along with Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
See Details

As we come to know more about trauma, describing a single event—physical or psychological, as ‘traumatic’ often ignores its role as a historical-political-social phenomenon that pertains to much more than an individual’s experience. Perhaps it is the lack of appropriate language within the fields of trauma studies that has caused this disconnect as the stories of survivors are more often than not, tossed aside and regarded as anomalous. My thesis seeks to delve into the almost inconceivable and inaccessible territory of the Gwangju Uprising and the Tiananmen Massacre, whose histories have been created and defined by the state. Within the stories of survivors emerge heterotopias or countersites to the dominant, ‘acceptable’ renditions of these events and as such, I seek to reconstruct the theoretical framework by which we analyze the cultural nuances of trauma within East Asia that is particular to student-led democratization movements.

Kayla Smitson is a second year IDMA student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature. They received their bachelor’s degree in Asian Studies with a minor in Korean Culture and Language at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Their research interests include the portrayal of trauma in literature and film in contemporary China and South Korea, particularly in the 1960s-1980s.

To attend: click here.
Passcode: 616172

1:30 pm Cultural Event
Nalistniki Fundraising Event to Support Ukraine
Location:
Global Hub - 1st Floor Posvar
Sponsored by:
Center for Russian East European and Eurasian Studies and Global Hub along with Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures; Pitt Russian Club; Pitt Ukrainian Club
See Details

Stop by the Global Hub on March 4 from 1:30-2:30 for a bake sale of Ukrainian nalistniki (pancakes), learning Ukrainian songs, and more! Donations will be used to support the Ukrainian people.

This event is organized and sponsored by the Slavic Department, the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the Russian Club.

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