Description

Dr. Wysocki will discuss the activity and archival heritage of the Ukrainian Bureau in London, which was established in 1931 with the aim of informing international opinion about the Ukrainians in Galicia, then part of Poland. Although the office was to exist for about two years, it continued to operate until the outbreak of World War Two. During its existence, the Ukrainian Bureau played a key role in the area of Ukrainian civic diplomacy and disseminating information on the situation in Ukraine, especially on the Holodomor.

Historian Roman Wysocki is a lecturer at the Institute of History at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland. He is the author of three books and numerous articles on Polish-Ukrainian relations between the two world wars and on Ukrainians and Belarusians in Poland. His areas of interest include Ukrainian political thought, Polish-Ukrainian history in the twentieth century, Ukrainian emigrants in Poland, reactions to the Holodomor, and the Orthodox Church in Poland.

Description

Why do states that confront comparable immigration challenges oftentimes adopt remarkably different policy solutions? Why does immigration policy change radically at certain points in time, whilst showing striking resilience at others? This talk presents a theoretical framework for the comparative study of immigration policy making. I argue the capacity of policy makers to turn their immigration preferences into policy is contingent on three types of political insulation. Whereas popular insulation will shield policy makers from public pressure for policy restrictionism, interest group insulation and diplomatic insulation are necessary if policy makers are to enjoy reprieve from demands by domestic lobbies and foreign governments for policy liberalization. Because each type of insulation differs across institutional arenas, immigration policy choices will vary not only across countries but, in contexts where actors can manipulate the institutional locus of policy making, also over time.
 
Antje Ellermann is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Institute for European Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She is also the founder and Co-lead of the UBC Migration Research Excellence Cluster. Professor Ellermann’s research focuses on the politics of migration and citizenship in liberal democracies. Her book States Against Migrants: Deportation in Germany and the United States (2009) was published with Cambridge University Press. Her work has also appeared in World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Politics & Society, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and West European Politics. Professor Ellermann’s lecture draws from a book manuscript she is completing that theorizes the politics of immigration policy making in liberal democracies. The project is based on case studies of key episodes of immigration reform in Switzerland, Germany, Canada, and the United States from the 1950s to the present.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

Immigration to Canada has always raised questions about how society achieves a greater degree of unity, or integration, in the context of religious diversity. Recent polling reports that religious communities play a key role in the process of integration within Canadian society, by serving as a cultural bridge and offering social and spiritual support to newcomers. However, religion is also a focus point of reactionary forces in society, as national debates around accommodation, education, and schooling become inflamed by local events. These debates are often framed around competing rights claims. What is the role of human rights law and language, including around religious freedom, and what are its limits? What is the role of religious groups and communities in helping to foster understanding, tolerance, and mutual respect? To what extent, if at all, should the government become involved in regulating religious diversity?
Panelists:
Dr. Andrew Parkin, Executive Director at Environics Institute for Survey Research
Dr. Shaheen Azmi, Director of Policy Education Monitoring and Outreach for the Ontario Human Rights Commission
Dr. Shari Golberg, Senior Policy Advisor, OPS Inclusive Diversity Office, Treasury Board Secretariat
This seminar series explores the role of religion in migration to Canada, with regard to settlement and integration, accommodation and reaction, and citizenship and participation. Each seminar brings together scholars and practitioners to discuss the ways in which religious belief and practice, religious community life, and religious institutions influence migrant pathways to participation in Canadian life and society. This seminar series is organized in partnership with the Global Migration Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, the Baha’i Community of Canada and the University of Toronto Multi-Faith Centre.

Description

This lecture is based on a study that suggests that the “Putin Exodus” is composed of highly educated and socially aware individuals— lending support to the idea that outbound migration is in fact a “brain drain.” The study also indicates that this emigration is composed of people who identify with the values that have made the West prosper. The results indicate that so long as authoritarianism and politically connected economic privilege continue in Russia, talented people will continue to leave. The study also undermines the notion peddled by the Kremlin that Russia represents a distinct civilization with its own distinctive values, stressing communal advantage over individual liberty and well-being. In short, the study suggests that the emigration can be a bridge between the West and a Russia that is not destined to be authoritarian. The political views of this group are encouraging. So is their continued interest in Russia. Russians, not the West, will determine the future of Russia. But the values and activities of these émigrés provide reason to hope that future may be one that includes cooperation and comity between Russia and the West based upon the values that have produced extraordinary liberty, prosperity, and peace since the end of World War II.

Dr. Sergei Erofeev is currently a lecturer at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He has been involved in the internationalization of universities in Russia since the early 1990s. Previously, Dr. Erofeev served as a vice rector for international affairs at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, the dean of international programs at the European University at Saint Petersburg, and the director of the Center for Sociology of Culture at Kazan Federal University in Russia. He has also been a Hubert H. Humphrey fellow at the University of Washington. Prior to his career in academia, Dr. Erofeev was a concert pianist, and has worked in the area of the sociology of the arts.

This event is sponsored in part by the DAAD with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).

Description

Tens of thousands of French prisoners of war (POWs) and German women had to stand trial in Nazi Germany for having engaged in a love relation with each other. The prisoner and the woman both faced severe punishment, and the woman had to suffer public shaming. What do the trials reveal about Franco-German relations in World War II? How did French POWs and German women perceive each other? How did German village and factory communities react to these international love relations? Why did the relations never become part of memory in either country? The project examines Franco-German collaboration and international relations from a new perspective grounded in the everyday life experience in wartime Nazi Germany.

Raffael Scheck is Katz Distinguished Teaching Professor of Modern European History at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. He has published five books and 40 articles on German right-wing politics and on French colonial prisoners of war. His book on the German army massacres of black French prisoners in 1940 was translated into French and German. He has completed a book manuscript on forbidden love relations between western prisoners of war and German women in World War II and is beginning to write a book on the German campaign in the West in 1940.

This event is funded in part by the DAAD through the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).

Description

Rereading Proust in 2019? Whose reading? Who is reading the Recherche du temps perdu? I am celebrating fifty years of reading Proust, remembering my first reading of Proust’s novel more than half a century ago. That sounds like a very long time. Proust died in 1922.  When I read him in 1967-69, that was less than fifty years after his death. The interval, the span of time between Proust’s death and my first reading of the Recherche was shorter than the years I have lived with Proust, alongside the Recherche, reading and rereading it all over again, editing it, teaching it. And the cultural, epistemological context of each reading has been profoundly different. Can one recover the original emotion?
 
Antoine Compagnon has been professor at Columbia University since 1985 and at the Collège de France since 2006, where he holds the Chair in French Modern and Contemporary Literature. His research interests span Sixteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century French literature and literary theory and history of criticism.  He is the author of two novels and over twenty volumes of seminal essays on major writers from Montaigne to Proust, a number of which were translated into English: Proust entre deux siècles (trans. 1992); Les Cinq Paradoxes de la Modernité (trans. 1994); Démon de la théorie (trans. 2004); La littérature, pour quoi faire? (trans. 2014); Un été avec Montaigne (trans. 2019).  He also co-authored The Death of French Culture with Donald Morrison (2010) and edited numerous works by Marcel Proust. Antoine Compagnon has been granted the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa from King’s College London, HEC in Paris and the University of Liège He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academia Europaea and corresponding fellow of the British Academy. He has been awarded by France the decorations of Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, Officier de l’ordre national du Mérite, Commandeur de l’ordre des Palmes académiques and Officier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
 

Description

Randall Hansen: “War, Work, and Want: The Political Economy and Human Trafficking in South Africa and Thailand”

This paper examines two countries with sharply different levels of trafficking: South Africa and Thailand. Both are middle-income countries; both are larger than their contiguous neighbours; both are much wealthier than their immediate neighbours; and both are regional hegemons. Their common migration experiences, geopolitical contexts, and relative wealth levels are precisely the factors that the existing literature cites as the drivers of human trafficking. Given these shared characteristics, the fact that there is more trafficking in Thailand than in South Africa is puzzling. The paper argues that contrasting growth models, developed in the 1980s, explain the difference: whereas Thailand adopted a growth model based on cheap exports and cheap labour, South Africa adopted one based on finance.

Darius Ornston: “Ideas as an Innovation Policy Instrument: How Collective Narratives Shape Economic Adjustment”

This paper argues that innovation studies should take ideas more seriously, because innovation is a complex, uncertain, and fundamentally collective activity. While scholars are sensitive to the ways in which ideas shape policy choice, this paper illustrates how collective narratives can function as a policy instrument in their own right, facilitating and channeling innovative activity. Closer attention to collective narratives, and the role of ideas more generally, sheds new light on old cases (high-technology competition in Finland) and resolves some empirical puzzles (the entrepreneurship in Kitchener-Waterloo and financial services in Iceland).

Description

No registration is required for this event.

Seminar in Ottoman and Turkish Studies presented

Sakis Gekas, Associate Professor and Hellenic Heritage Foundation Chair of Modern Greek History, York University

"The Ottoman and Other Imperial Turns in the Historiography of the 1821 Greek Revolution"

December 5, 2022, NMC Conference Room (BF200B), 4 Bancroft Ave, 2nd floor

Abstract:

The bicentennial of the 1821 Greek revolution signalled a turn in the historiography of the great event towards Ottoman and other imperial (British, French, Russian) histories. The paper discussed the contextualization of the Revolution within trans-imperial and trans-national networks, and focused on the much more advanced understanding of the Ottoman context of the revolution. Works published by historians of the Ottoman Empire, including the publication of primary sources, and a focus on the empires that lined up in support of the Greek cause and against the Ottomans, allow for a richer and more nuanced understanding of the Greek revolution than before.

Description

China is a new great power entering a geopolitically tense region of Central Europe, where Russia, Western Europe, and the U.S. have competed throughout the 20th century for influence. China benefitted from growing scepticism towards the West after the 2008 crisis and was looked upon by many in the region as an alternative. At the same time, with most of the economic expectations of China remaining unfulfilled, the frustration of China has grown as well, aided also by the different outlooks of Communism and the general suspicions of great powers in the region. The presentation will look into political, economic, and social aspects of China-Central Europe relations and its implications for Europe, in general, to show that even though China has presented new challenges, it is unlikely to compete on equal footing with the established great powers in the region.

Richard Q. Turcsányi is a Key Researcher at Palacky University Olomouc, Assistant Professor at Mendel University in Brno, and Program Director at the Central European Institute of Asian Studies (www.ceias.eu). He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations and further degrees in economy and political science. In past, he conducted long-term study and research stays at the University of Toronto, Peking University, National Chengchi University in Taipei, and the European Institute for Asian Studies in Brussels. His research interests include Chinese foreign policy, relations between China and (Central and Eastern) Europe, and international relations of Asia-Pacific.

Description

Classical Turkish Literature is full of road and journey stories. In classical texts of Turkish literature, the journey is circular. This cyclicality is largely related to the perception of the universe by Sufism and this perception was inspired by Ptolemy’s theory. Turkish literature constructs the perception of the mystical universe through the wahdat al-wujud theory. According to Sufism, the soul is in state of homesickness. Sufi stories also tell the story of the return of the soul to the homeland (God). This is also the return of the individual to find himself. There is a saying attributed to the prophet of Islam: “To know yourself is to know Allah” (man ‘arafa nafsahu faqad ‘arafa rabbahu). This journey is also the journey of self-maturation. We can trace these themes in pre-Islamic Turkish literature going back to Uighur Buddhist texts and in the Islamic period examples inspired by Persian and Arabic literature: Turkish epics and Uighur Buddhist and Manichean texts (9th and 10th centuries), Iranian masnavis (especially ‘Attar in the 12th century and Jami‘ in the15th century), Arabic symbolic stories (Ibn Tufeyl’s Arabic philosophical novel and an allegorical Hayy bın Yaqzan, early 12th century) were sources of road stories in Turkish literature. This seminar will focus on the mystical lines of this journey with examples from Turkish literature from the 13th through the19th centuries.

Description

This talk introduces Empire’s Legacy (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), which challenges the claim that globalization and its losers explain right-wing populism today. In France, a potential born of older relations between colonizers and colonized has revitalized the party of Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen. Starting with the French conquest of Algeria in 1830, Empire’s Legacy analyzes shifting settler identities under colonialism; and their place, nature, and transmission in the postcolonial Fifth Republic. Drawing on archival research, subject interviews, and electoral surveys, Empire’s Legacy charts an interdisciplinary course between history, sociology, political science, and discourse analysis. It also combines analysis at the local, national, and international levels. This shows the importance of ethnic cleavages, social milieus, government probity, and political responses. As such, Empire’s Legacy has implications for other party families, social movements, and subaltern politics.
 
John Veugelers is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. He has written widely on the far right, immigration politics, social movements, and voluntary associations in Canada, France, and Italy. His articles have appeared in a range of scholarly journals that includes: Ethnic and Racial Studies, International Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, Comparative European Politics, European Journal of Political Research, Sociological Quarterly, Current Sociology, Acta Sociologica, and West European Politics. A recipient of awards for outstanding teaching at the University of Toronto, he has been a visiting professor at universities in Europe, Asia, and Africa; and a visiting fellow at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France.
 

Description

Since the election of the new president of the Republic of Uzbekistan (2016), the republic has faced sweeping transformations. The reforms have targeted civic, economic, as well as many government structures. On the eve of elections set to take place on Dec. 22, many wonder if now is the right time to expand reforms into the parliamentary arena, which until now has changed little. This talk raises key questions regarding the possible future of the division of power in Uzbekistan and relations between the government and political parties

Description

The nineteenth century was defined by the global problem of property. Focusing on France, a country whose revolution purportedly birthed a new, liberal form of private property, this paper explores the nineteenth-century debate on ‘mobilization’, or legal modes of turning land into a circulating value. It focuses particularly on the role of imperial entanglements in shaping arguments and experiments in mobilization. In the second half of the century a series of laws advanced the visibility and alienability of real property in Algeria and Tunisia, and it was here that France went furthest with measures of financializing land, experimenting with credit instruments based on real property that were long debated but never introduced in the metropole. Building on recent scholarship that has illuminated the legal transformations in property rights that occurred around the nineteenth-century Mediterranean, this paper demonstrates the degree to which these processes implicated metropolitan and imperial landholding in a common project of commercial and financial modernization.

Dr. Alexia Yates is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Manchester, where she researches urban history and the history of economic life in Europe. Her first book, Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siècle Capital (Harvard University Press, 2015), won the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize for Best Book in Non-Canadian History from the Canadian Historical Association in 2016. She is currently working on a book on the culture and politics of finance in modern France and as well as a text on real estate and global urban history.

Description

As the anthropologist Rubie S. Watson once asked, “How do people remember events that ‘did not occur’? How do people ‘remember what is meant to be forgotten”? This lecture will explore the decade between 1945 and 1955, when the Holodomor was “first remembered”. It will examine the active construction and transmission of a social memory of the Terror-Famine among post-war refugees from the Soviet Union. It will also consider how remembrance of the Holodomor shaped and, in turn, was shaped by the emerging Cold War.

After 1945, the Holodomor became part of making the case in the West for legal recognition and assistance for refugees fleeing Communism. As the Cold War escalated, famine survivors were increasingly called on as witnesses in a fierce political debate in the U.S. about the nature of the Soviet Union and U.S. policy towards the Soviet Union.

Olga Andriewsky is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Trent University. She teaches and researches in the area of late imperial and Soviet history. She is the author of “Towards a Decentered History: The Study of the Holodomor and Ukrainian Historiography” (Contextualizing the Holodomor). She has also written numerous articles on identity and politics in late Imperial Russia. Her article “The Russian-Ukrainian Discourse and the Failure of the ‘Little Russian Solution’, 1782-1917” in Culture, Nation, Identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter, 1600-1945 was awarded the AAUS prize for best academic article in 2004.

Description

Pierre Guimond is currently Diplomat in Residence and Senior Fellow at the Graduate School of International Studies of Laval University. Prior that he was Minister-Counsellor and Head of the Foreign Policy and Diplomacy Section of the Canadian Embassy in Paris.
He started his career in 1979 at the Ministry of Intergovernmental Affairs of the Government of Québec with assignments as desk officer in federal-provincial relations and then Head of the public affairs section of the Québec Government Office in Toronto. He joined the Canadian Foreign Service in 1987 and served in Prague, Bonn and Vienna before becoming Ambassador to Hungary, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina from 2007 to 2010. At the headquarters of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, he served as desk officer for the Policy and Strategic Analysis Division, USSR and Central and Eastern Europe Division. He was also deputy director of the European Union Division and Senior Departmental Assistant to Minister of Foreign Affairs Bill Graham. He later became Director of the European Union Division, Eastern Europe and Balkans Division and Policy Planning Division. Mr. Guimond also had an assignment as foreign policy advisor in the Foreign Policy and Defense Secretariat of the Privy Council Office. A graduate of Laval University in Political science, he is also an Auditor of the French Institut des Hautes études de défense nationale. He is a member of the External Advisor Committee of the Canadian Foreign Service Institute, member of the board of Canadian associations on international affairs and is a frequent commentator on French Canadian media.

Pierre Guimond’s first posting abroad as a junior diplomat was as Third Secretary and Vice Consul at the Canadian Embassy to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic from the summer of 1988 to that of 1990, a time known in that country as the end of the period of “Normalisation”. While his basic tasks were, among others, to understand the local political scene and reporting back to Ottawa, doing that meant that Guimond had to maintain close contacts with many individuals known as ‘dissidents” by the Soviet-styled local authorities. Although “the” Canadian government expert on Czechoslovakia at the time, he, like so many other observers, failed to see coming the rapid transformation that was to occur in this Central European countries in the Fall of 1989 and which led to the lead dissident being elected President of the Republic. A key witness to both the political oppression and the uprising of the Czech and Slovak peoples, this diplomat ended up providing some support to members of the dissident movement, that included Vaclav Havel, in their communication with “the West”.

Description

Stalin and other early Soviet leaders saw the Caucasus as the USSR’s fruit and vegetable basket, reshaping agricultural practices and altering the natural landscape to favor “export” agriculture. Such beliefs only became realized much later, however, and hardly in the way these leaders envisioned. As the USSR became a consumer society, centered on major Russian cities, Caucasus—and, later, Central Asian—growers realized the money that could be made selling their products directly to northern customers. Municipal officials in Moscow and elsewhere realized the value of this trade to their citizens, who believed in the better quality of fresh fruits, vegetables and even flowers from the Soviet south. Existing in a “gray zone” between first and second economies, this long-distance movement of fresh food and flowers proliferated in the Soviet Union’s last two decades. Images of the time, which still dominate characterizations of the late USSR, showed mostly-empty grocery stores shelves and long queues for food. I argue however that these beliefs of the Soviet Union as a land of scarcity miss the dynamic, and quite capitalist, nature of food sales in the late USSR. This movement—of people and goods—had varied consequences on everything from natural environments in the Soviet south to family life among traders as well as the health of the Russian population. Racism was one significant outgrowth of this trade. Southern traders, denigrated as “blacks” were seen to befoul as well as benefit Moscow with their unofficial and ostensibly exploitative practices. The host Russian population’s racist stereotypes towards these traders began to apply more broadly to Soviet citizens of the Caucasus and Central Asia. In memories, nonetheless, these long-distance food traders believed that the USSR offered them a chance to overcome mundane lives in southern villages and succeed at its very center.

Description

After he asserted direct control of New France in the 1660s, Louis XIV’s authority was largely unrestricted. As scholars of his reign have pointed out in relation to the political legitimacy of his regime in France itself, the manufactured symbols of Louis XIV’s kingship finessed the contradictions between his centralization of authority and his continued reliance on local elites. In the case of an overseas colony, there was no possibility that the king would ever favour his distant subjects with his presence. The monarch could be nothing but representation. This paper looks at the representations of monarchical authority in various media: paintings and prints, a statue in Lower Town Québec, currency and medals, and the legal system. The distance of the colony meant in some cases relying on expedients to govern the French population.

Dr. Colin Coates teaches Canadian Studies and History at Glendon College, York University. He has published on the history of rural society in the St Lawrence Valley (The Metamorphosis of Landscape and Community in Early French Canada) and on the history of commemoration (Heroines and History: Representations of Madeleine de Verchères and Laura Secord, with Cecilia Morgan). He is currently working on studies of political culture in Louis XIV’s New France and the environmental history of Québec. He recently co-edited The Nature of Canada, with Graeme Wynn.

Description

By the end of April 1920, three brigades of the Red Ukrainian Halych Army were staying on the frontline in the central Ukraine. This were the remains of Ukrainian forces, which after being thrown out from Eastern Galicia in July 1919, merged with the Army of Ukraine People’s Republic and together launched Kyiv offensive during the summer of 1919. However, because of typhus epidemy, the result of which was loss of combat capabilities, Galicians were forced to join the Denikin’s Volunteer Army in November 1919 and eventually crossed over to the side of Bolsheviks. After the riot against Soviets in the end of April, two brigades once again tried crossed over the sides in hope to re-merge with Petlura’s units, whereas third brigade stayed with Soviets until it was crushed near Korosten. Yet Polish military authorities with acceptance from Military Ministry of Ukrainian People’s Republic decided to disarm Galician units, put them into temporary camps in the Ukraine, then moved to Galicia, and eventually divided into two parts: vast majority of privates and N.C.Os were released to homes, whereas the smaller part, consisted mostly of officers, were transported to the camp of Tuchola for further internment. They have been staying in the Polish captivity for a few months, usually 8 – 9, though some of them were there for over one year, and the very last of Ukrainians were released only after over two years, in October 1922.

Description

Zosa Szajkowski, a Polish-born Jewish historian, took tens of thousands of Jewish documents from Europe in the 1940s and ‘50s and moved them, illicitly, to New York. He eventually sold them to Jewish research libraries in the United States and Israel. Was this a heroic act of salvage, or simply theft?

Join us for a lecture by Lisa Leff, author of The Archive Thief, Professor of History at American University, and Director of the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The event will be moderated by Doris Bergen, with responses by Eric Jennings and Sara R. Horowitz.

A reception will precede the event, starting at 3:30 pm.

Description

As immigrants in Canada settle and integrate into society, most eventually become citizens. Citizenship is more than just a legal status, it comes with expectations of social participation and civic engagement. On one hand, religion promotes bonds of fellowship and social cooperation that help to enrich civic participation; however, in some cases it can also reinforce social divisions of “us” and “them”. In what ways, and under what conditions, does religion help or hinder this process of civic participation for newcomers to Canada? What can be done to strengthen the participation of newcomers in Canadian society in a way that does not enforce a rigid or closed secularism? How should religious groups structure inter-faith dialogue differently to promote greater civic engagement? What other spaces exist for this conversation to develop?

Seminar Series on Religion and Migration in Canada

This seminar series explores the role of religion in migration to Canada, with regard to settlement and integration, accommodation and reaction, and citizenship and participation. Each seminar brings together scholars and practitioners to discuss the ways in which religious belief and practice, religious community life, and religious institutions influence migrant pathways to participation in Canadian life and society. This seminar series is organized in partnership with the Global Migration Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, the Baha’i Community of Canada and the University of Toronto Multi-Faith Centre.

Description

This talk comes to grips with LGBTQ discourse in Russia outside of the familiar political and social narratives of oppression and violence that have been prevalent since the 2013 “anti-gay-propaganda” legislation. It turns instead to the cultural sphere and challenges its widely held perception as an arena for exclusively heteronormative discourse by revealing queerness as an increasingly popular object of artistic exploration and a recurrent performative strategy within the Russian performing arts and dramatic writing of the 21st century. I zoom into the stories of drag queens, transgender persons, gays, lesbians, and multiple queer selves and others to unveil the unique combination of linguistic, performative, and visual means that shape queerness as a Russian cultural imaginary. Apart from discussing the portrayals of queerness that emerge on stage and in dramatic texts, I will also focus on the institutional context in which these images are produced, paying attention, among other things, to the geographical determinants of the possibilities of individual narratives.

Tatiana Klepikova is a Faculty of Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the Women & Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, where she is working on her postdoctoral project about contemporary Russian queer theater and drama. She defended her Ph.D. in Slavic Literary Studies at the University of Passau, Germany, in 2019, after obtaining degrees in Teaching Foreign Languages (English and Spanish) in Yaroslavl (Russia), and Russian and East-Central European Studies in Passau. She is co-editor of several collections of interdisciplinary essays on privacy, including Outside the “Comfort Zone”: Private and Public Spheres in Late Socialist Europe (forthcoming in 2020 by De Gruyter). Her broader research interests include Soviet and contemporary Russian history and culture, political art, cultural privacy studies, queer studies, performance studies, and histories and cultures of LGBT communities in Eastern Europe.