Description

This presentation will trace the history of the construction of the Moscow Canal by forced labor. Building on this foundation we will then explore the myriad cultural products and programs that were produced and implemented during the waterway’s construction by the very same “canal soldiers” who were building the canal. These cultural elements emanated from a desire to spatially inscribe, showcase, and glorify Stalinist ideology through a major Gulag construction project, the likes of which was never seen before. Arguably this impulse continues to infuse and affect the project’s legacy as succeeding generations of its observers and users attempt to reconcile the Moscow Canal’s deathly past with its evolving future.

Cynthia Ruder is Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Kentucky where she teaches Russian language, literature, and culture. Her first book Making History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal explored the construction of this waterway with special attention paid to the concomitant volume published to celebrate it The History of the Construction of the Stalin White-Sea Baltic Canal. Her most recent book Building Stalinism: The Moscow Canal and the Creation of Soviet Space unravels the nexus of gulag-culture-memory by examining the spaces and places they occupied within the context of a Gulag construction project and contemporary Moscow. In her current project she hopes to translate and annotate booklets in the Library of Reforging series authored and produced in the Dmitlag camp that constructed the Moscow Canal to give voice to those gulag inmates from whom little is often heard.

Description

More than seven decades after the collapse of Mussolini’s regime, the physical and iconographic traces of Italian Fascism – monuments, buildings, inscriptions, artworks – remain a lightning-rod of controversy. In this talk, historian Joshua Arthurs considers the central role played by Fascist material culture in contemporary debates over the future of Italian democracy and national identity, race and immigration, and memory and modernity. He also considers the implications of Italian debates for current memory politics in Canada and around the globe.

Joshua Arthurs is an Associate Professor in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto-Scarborough, specializing in the cultural, social, and intellectual history of modern Italy and Europe. His interests include fascism and the far right; the politics of memory, monuments and museums; ideologies of race, empire, and the classical tradition; and everyday life in wartime and dictatorship. He is the author of Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy (Cornell University Press, 2012) and co-editor of Outside the State? The Politics of Everyday Life in Fascist Italy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). His current book project, Forty-Five Days: Emotion, Experience and Memory after Mussolini, under contract with Oxford University Press, examines popular responses to the collapse of the Fascist regime in 1943. He has also written extensively on the afterlives of Fascist monuments in contemporary Italy and contested heritage in a global context.

Description

From the 1840s until 1917, prostitution was legally tolerated across the Russian Empire under a system known as regulation. Like other systems of regulation that were in place across the European continent and beyond, women who sold sex in the Russian Empire were required to register their details with the police, attend regular gynaecological examinations, and abide by a whole host of restrictions. The regulation system had a far-reaching impact upon the lives of various groups within urban society. Brothel madams bickered with urban residents over the visibility and audibility of prostitution in urban space. Poorly paid police agents forged advantageous financial relationships with registered prostitutes and their managers. As the Russian government became more concerned with combatting rising venereal diseases amongst the population in the early twentieth century, the bodies of certain groups of lower-class men also became objects of state intervention.

In this talk, Siobhán Hearne will present an overview of her book Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia (OUP, 2021). This book approaches the history of state regulation from the perspectives of those working, using, or encountering the commercial sex industry on a regular basis. Examining the lives, challenges, and voices of registered prostitutes, their clients, their managers, the police, and the urban communities who shared their streets with state-licenced brothels allows us to examine the rich tapestry of urban life in the final decades of the Russian Empire.

Siobhán Hearne is a historian of gender and sexuality in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. She received her PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2017 and is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University. Her work has appeared in the journals Kritika, Journal of Social History, Revolutionary Russia, Social History, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality.

Description

We look forward to our talk and would like to discuss following questions that led us to writing this book:
How to pose the struggle against anti-Gypsism, if claims of eliminating racism seem to be unrealistic or, even more, bringing risks to historical justice for Romani people?
What is the role of critical whiteness in shaping the agenda of desegregation for Romani people? Who are the potential agents of critical whiteness and what are the specific ways of practicing it in Central and Eastern Europe?
Was nation-building, or more generally, the building of national identities in Central Europe a decisive factor in rooting the segregation of Romani people? What was the historical impact of Central European racially minded experts on legitimizing the segregation of Romani people?
And why do all these questions have a continuing relationship with Czech race science, and the history of state police and medical surveillance across Central Europe?

Victoria Shmidt brings together the issue of historical roots of segregation with the legacy of colonial and socialist policies in Central Eastern European countries. Since 2019 Victoria leads the project “Race science: Undiscovered Power of building the nations” at the University of Graz.

Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky is associate professor of sociology at Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Republic), and Faculty Fellow at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology.

Description

From 1960 to 1966, after more than a century of colonial occupation in Algeria, the French military exploded multiple nuclear bombs in the region of the central Sahara: four atmospheric “tests” at Reggane, followed by another 13 underground, southeast at In Ekker. The health, environmental, political, cultural, and psychological effects of these detonations in the Sahara have continued to radiate for decades since. In this talk, Dr. Panchasi will be sharing a set of historical objects and questions from her current book project, The “French Bomb” in Culture and Empire, 1945-1962.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in modern France and empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (Cornell University Press, 2009). Her current research focuses on the cultural politics of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent publication related to this project, “‘No Hiroshima in Africa’: The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara,” appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present.

Description

Organized in the wake of World War Two by the victorious Allies, the Nuremberg Trials were intended to hold the Nazis to account for their crimes and to restore a sense of justice to a world devastated by violence. As Francine Hirsch reveals in her groundbreaking new book, a major piece of the Nuremberg story has routinely been left out: the critical role of the Soviet Union. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg offers a startlingly new view of the International Military Tribunal and a fresh perspective on the movement for international human rights that it helped launch.

Francine Hirsch is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches courses on Soviet history, Modern European history, and the history of human rights. Her first book, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (2005), received several awards, including the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association and the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Her second book, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II (2020), was awarded four book prizes: the 2021 Certificate of Merit for a Preeminent Contribution to Creative Scholarship from the American Society for International Law, the Heldt Prize of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies, the Barbara Jelavich prize of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the Beer Prize of the American Historical Association. Hirsch has started work on a new book project on the history of Russian-American entanglement, with a focus on economics, science, culture, and international law.

Description

They began as local protests in western Kazakhstan over rising fuel prices. By January 4, all of Kazakhstan witnessed mass mobilization against poor economic prospects and elite corruption. Government buildings were seized, security forces began to support the protesters, and looting and street fighting occurred in the country’s largest city of Almaty. Late on January 5, troops from the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization arrived at the request of embattled President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.

In this panel, we discuss what happened in Kazakhstan, why it happened, and what the prospects are for the near future.

Dr. Asel Doolotkeldieva is a Senior Lecturer at the OSCE Academy, Bishkek Kyrgyzstan. Her ongoing book project focuses on protests and contentious politics in Eurasia.

Dr. Assel Tutumlu, Assistant Professor in International Relations and Political Science at Near East University, Northern Cyprus. Her research focuses on Central Asian authoritarian politics and regimes with the focus on Kazakhstan.

Darmen Koktov is a Research Assistant at the University of Toronto. He holds an MA in European and Russian Affairs from the University of Toronto and an MA in International Relations from KIMEP University, Kazakhstan. His final research paper at UofT focused on power transitions in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

Description

Afghanistan is complex, diverse, and changing. In ‘Afghan Voices’ we invite Afghans from a variety of perspectives to reflect on the past twenty years—from the US invasion in 2001 to the Taliban takeover in 2021. In doing so, they link their own personal stories to questions about Afghanistan’s past and future.

Minaa Rayan is a humanitarian and development practitioner, currently doing an MA in Policy Economics at the Center for Development Economies, Williams College, Massachusetts.

“I grew up in Afghanistan where I completed high school and did a BSc. in Physics and spent the last 5-6 years working for international organizations and the UN in the field of programme evaluation and community engagement.

I began my career at Save the Children, where I worked in the evaluation unit of a community-based education project, aimed at enchasing school enrollment and transition to secondary school.

Later on, I moved to Action Against Hunger, where I worked to bring the organization and beneficiaries closer through downward accountability mechanisms, especially around the time of drought in Ghor and Helamand.

For the last two years, I worked for UNICEF and contributed to the evaluation of several programmes in education, health, nutrition and child protection sectors. The findings of those evaluations were used to guide the policies of the government and partner organizations.

I have had formal and informal membership of some social groups including Ayel Social Association, Afghan Evaluation Society and ICOMSA.
I am a friend and colleague to many brilliant Afghan girls and women and an aunt to three brilliant children, which I think explains part of my passion to work for child- and women-centered programmes.

To sum up, I lose sleep over issues of inequality, poverty and inefficiency.”

Description

Between the two world wars, Karel Čapek was the Czech nation’s leading novelist, playwright, newspaper columnist, travel writer, and critic. I would love to talk about his penultimate play, ‘The White Disease,’ which was a dark satirical send-up of fascism and opportunism, set against the backdrop of a deadly pandemic. The antimilitary utopian play was as prescient then as it is topical today, in the time of coronavirus. His play “R.U.R.,” which gave birth to a word robot, was also a critique of mechanization and the ways it can dehumanize people. I will also present the situation in the Czech and Slovak theatre scene in the years of pandemic and restrictions. It will be interesting to discuss if Czech and world theatre in general have anything new to offer and which topics they deal with the most. What can we learn from Čapek’s plays after 100 years of modern civilisation?

Hasan Zahirović (1975, Bosnia and Hercegovina) graduated from the Faculty of Arts in Sarajevo, majoring in pedagogy, and the Faculty of Humanities in Mostar, majoring in acting. He completed a Master’s degree in theatre science at the Faculty of Philosophy of Masaryk University and a doctoral degree at Theatre Academy in Prague, majoring in Stage Design and Theory of Stage Design. He works in the field of Cultural Dramaturgy at the Silesian University and Theatre D21 in Prague. He focuses on acting, translation, and theatre science, specifically on interwar and modern Czech theatre. His research is based on Karel Čapek’s plays and their reception in ex-Yugoslav theatres, as well as the contemporary reception of Čapek’s plays worldwide.

Description

Afghanistan is complex, diverse, and changing. In ‘Afghan Voices’ we invite Afghans from a variety of perspectives to reflect on the past twenty years—from the US invasion in 2001 to the Taliban takeover in 2021. In doing so, they link their own personal stories to questions about Afghanistan’s past and future.

Pashtana Durrani is an activist, educator, innovator, and writer. She is currently Executive Director of LEARN Afghanistan, Global Youth Representative for Amnesty International, a Malala Fund Education Champion Award winner, and contributes to Afghanistan Times and Kabul Times.

Pashtana started her journey as an activist and human rights defender. She is now a community development expert focusing on digital literacy, Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SHRH), Menstrual Health Management (MHM), and Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH). She is the Founder and Director of the grassroots-level non-profit LEARN Afghanistan. Through LEARN’s project Soraya, she has educated 7,000 girls and boys in Kandahar. Through Project Ayesha Durrani, she has trained more than 80 teachers in digital literacy. Through LEARN’s Project Malalai, Durrani has reached out to 150 girls and trained them in Menstrual Hygiene Management.

Pashtana received the Malala Fund Education Champion award and received a Development Fellowship on sexual and reproductive healthcare from the Aspen Institute. She is also a board member of the UNDP GEF steering committee.

Pashtana is also the winner of the Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize for 2021.

Description

In 1884, the first of 68 prisoners convicted of terrorist offences and membership of the revolutionary organization Narodnaia volia, were transferred to a new maximum security prison at Shlissel´burg Fortress near St Petersburg, the Russian Empire’s most notorious penal institution. The regime of indeterminate sentences in total isolation, complete inactivity and constant surveillance, caused severe mental and physical deterioration among the prisoners, over half of whom died. But the survivors fought back to reform the prison, ultimately overcoming the system of solitary confinement and improving the inmates’ living conditions. In this talk Sarah Young defines these works as a collective memoir, creating a biography of the fortress that identifies the inmates through their places within the prison’s topography. She shows how the texts inscribes forms of resistance that metaphorically – and at times literally – break down the prison walls, to build an exemplary prison community. In doing so they construct a unique genre within carceral writing that became a model for revolutionary activity.

Dr Sarah J. Young is Associate Professor of Russian at University College London, where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature, culture and thought. A Dostoevsky specialist, her interests in the ethics of narration and the construction of literary space led to her current research project, focusing on Russian prison and exile writing. Her book Writing Resistance: Revolutionary Memoirs of Shlissel’burg Prison, 1884-1906 was published by UCL Press in 2021.