CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

Signe Baumane (Latvian-born animator, artist, and film maker) discusses her animated films, particularly 'Rocks in my Pockets' (2014), a film about five Latvian women throughout the twentieth century, which focuses on topics of depression, suicide, marriage, and gender roles in Soviet-occupied and post-Soviet Latvia. Baumane also offers a glance at her work-in-progress animated feature film 'My Lo...

The introduction of an expansive housing reform in Moscow in 2017–the destruction and replacement of Khrushchev-era five story buildings–reflected a new form of consultative policy processes that demand state-society interaction. Similar policy interactions in democratic systems have led to increase in social capital and pro-social norms. In authoritarian contexts, they are a mechanism to win soci...

Dmitriy Vorobyev analyzes a unique dataset on personal characteristics of Russian regional governors serving between 2006 and 2019. Many of these governors have professional or educational military backgrounds. He combines the data with a panel of detailed regional budgets over the same period to identify any relationships between governors’ backgrounds and their spending preferences, and finds th...

"Ethnic and Religious Identities in Russian Penal Institutions: A Case Study of Uzbek Transnational Prisoners" discusses how the arrival of a large number of transnational Muslim prisoners shapes the traditional hierarchies and power relations in Russian penal institutions. He will argue that the large-scale migratory processes have transformed Russian penal institutions into a legally plural envi...

In December of this year, ten years will have passed since the death of the Czech writer, dissident, and statesman Václav Havel. This roundtable discusses Havelian concepts including “truth” (pravda), “power” (moc), “civil society” (občanská společnost), “appeal” (apel/výzva), “indifference” (lhostejnost), “focus/center” (ohnisko), “theater” (divadlo), “prison” (vězení), and “responsibility” (odpo...

In 1887, a Jewish eye doctor named L.L. Zamenhof launched his international auxiliary language “Esperanto” from the western borderlands of a tsarist empire in crisis. Brigid O’Keeffe traces the history of Esperanto as a utopian vision rooted in late imperial Russian culture through to its rise as a vibrant global movement that inspired women and men around the world in the late nineteenth and earl...

Dr. Molly Blasing presents material from her recent book, Snapshots of the Soul: Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern Russian Culture (Cornell UP, 2021). She considers how photography has shaped Russian poetry from the early twentieth century to the present day, using examples of photo-poetic writing by Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Brodsky, and other 20th and 21st century poets. Listen to learn about how th...

As the United States rose to ascendancy in the first decades of the twentieth century, observers abroad associated American economic power most directly with its burgeoning automobile industry. In the 1930s, in a bid to emulate and challenge America, engineers from across the world flocked to Detroit. Chief among them were Nazi and Soviet specialists who sought to study, copy, and sometimes steal...

The war conflict in Eastern Ukraine started in 2014 and it is still far from its resolution. One of the most debated questions during all those years was the following: Who joined anti-Kyiv armed groups during the first years of the Donbass war, and why? Some experts claimed that Russian soldiers and paid volunteers constituted the majority of irregular anti-Kyiv forces. Others that observe the ci...

Rather than treat Soviet dissidents as avatars of Western liberalism, or take their appeals to rights and legal norms as natural, this talk investigates how, as products themselves of the Soviet order, dissidents arrived at a conception of law and human personality so at odds with official norms. Understanding this process – how orthodoxies contain the seeds of their own heresies, and how dissiden...

Darren Thies will share perspectives and advice on the career of a diplomat, learning foreign languages (particularly Persian dialects), current U.S. policies in Central Asia, and the human geography of the region. Darren can offer insights and answer questions on the cultures of Central Asia, traveling in the region, perceptions of Americans, how language is used in practice, and how the region h...

What does intersectionality as praxis look like in Kyrgyzstan? Grassroots feminist, LGBTQ and transfeminist groups in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan are creating a unique space for themselves through various community art projects. The 2019 Feminnale Art Exhibit was one such meticulously curated space that provided possibilities for “subaltern voices to speak” (Spivak 1988) on the everyday experiences of wom...

The Kazakh famine of the 1930s was one of the great crimes of the Stalinist regime. More than 1.5 million people perished, and the disaster transformed a territory, Soviet Kazakhstan, the size of western Europe. But until recently, the crisis was little known in the West. In her talk, which draws from her recently published book, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakh...

This presentation seeks to explain both the motivations and justifications for the Chinese state’s mass human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, highlighting how intentions and explanations are inextricably linked. The motivations for what the state is doing are reflective of settler colonial ambitions in this region and an ardently colonial attitude towards Uyghurs and relate...

Artemy Kalinovsky’s Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018) investigates the Soviet effort to make the promises of decolonization a reality by looking at the politics and practices of economic development in central Asia between World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Focusing on the Tajik Soviet Soc...

The presentation discusses the stylistic, pragmatic, phraseological, lexical-semantic problems of literary translation from Uzbek into English and introduces the online poetic dictionary as a solution to overcome them. Gulnoza Odilova is an Uzbek scholar of Translation Studies. She did her PhD in 2011 and DSc in 2021. She works as an Associate Professor at Tashkent State University of Uzbek Langua...

“Eurasian Responses to the COVID-19 Crisis: Between Fact and Fear” with Caress Schenk, Associate Professor of Political Science, Nazarbayev University. Description: Amid the economic and health crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, underlying questions of state-society relations loom large in Eurasia: why do people follow or not follow regulations that the government deems healthy for them? Do p...

"Technological Solutions for Complex Problems: Emerging Electronic Surveillance Regimes in Eurasian Cities" with Erica Marat, Associate Professor at the College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University Description: ‘Smart city’ is the new buzzword in cities across Eurasia. Most large urban areas in the post-Soviet space have embraced smart city technologies, and those that ha...

"Calling the Future: What Names in Russian and East European Science Fiction Reveal" with Sibelan Forrester, Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Russian at Swarthmore College. Description: In Eastern Europe and Russia/the USSR, science fiction has often offered ways to make implicit assertions about the future. In Socialist Realism, representations of the future were constrained by Mar...

"China and the Uyghurs: Cultural Genocide in the Name of Counterterrorism" with Sean Roberts, Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs and Director of the International Development Studies program at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. Description: This presentation seeks to explain both the motivations and justifications for the Chinese...

“Queer Budapest: Sex, Society and the Illiberal State, Past and Present” with Anita Kurimay, Associate Professor of History, Bryn Mawr College Description: The presentation discusses the strange and enduring alliance between queer life and a series of illiberal Hungarian regimes throughout the first half of the 20th century, which had been silenced by subsequent political regimes. It details how t...

“Putinism and its Discontents” with Brian Taylor, Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University. Description: What is Putinism? Taylor argues that Putinism is both a mentality and a system of rule. In this talk, Taylor describes these two aspects of Putinism and examines the current challenges facing Vladimir Putin and Russia. Bio: Brian Taylor is a Professor of Political Science at the Ma...

“Mixed Messages: Mediating Native Belonging in Asian Russia” with Kathryn Graber, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Lecture co-sponsored by Indiana University. Description: Focusing on language and media in eastern Siberia, Mixed Messages (Cornell University Press, 2020) engages debates about the role of minority media in society, alternative visions of moderni...

"The Gendered Ambiguity of the Postcommunist Transitions" with Janet Elise Johnson, Professor of Political Science and Gender/Women’s Studies at Brooklyn College; Katalin Fábián, Professor of Government and Law at Lafayette College; and Mara Lazda, Professor of History at Bronx Community College. LECTURE DESCRIPTION: Kristen Ghodsee’s 2017 New York Times op-ed and subsequent popular book, "Why Wom...

“Promoting US Policy in Eurasia—A Practitioner’s View” with Caroline Savage, career Foreign Service Officer and non-resident fellow at Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. LECTURE DESCRIPTION: Foreign Service Officer and REECAS alumna Caroline Savage will talk about her extensive career in international affairs. Savage will discuss various topics relating to her academic and professi...