Description

In the months before we began to learn about the world-altering scale of the Covid-19 pandemic, Campbell was teaching at a University in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and preparing to return to a distant northern village after many years away. One Indigenous Evenki friend said to him at that time, “we are far from war and pestilence, these things just pass us by.” The world of armed conflict and infectious disease, seen from the Central Siberian Plateau, does seem far away at times. And yet that place, too, has been touched by disease and forced military conscriptions. Despite a sense of remoteness and the feel of a radically different pace for life, Evenkiia’s ‘magnitude of difference’ belies a density of shared experience. In this talk, Campbell explores insights from a nearly twenty-five-year friendship that has been renewed and sustained through social media and direct messaging. After sharing a series of photos Campbell’s friend wanted him to include in an ethnographic art installation, he wrote: “And tell them we’re for peace”— this message became the centerpiece of our collaboration. The photograph in these conditions builds on a unique mode of personal exchange: we remember each other’s visage and being through the surface of the image but our care for one another emerges through its density.  This work explores the shared and divergent temporalities of distant relations through the social space of photographs.

Craig Campbell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been conducting anthropological research in Siberia since the late 1990s. He has written extensively on themes associated with photography, multimodal anthropology, Siberia and the Yenisei North, culture and political struggles of Indigenous Siberians, travel and mobility, and socialist colonialism. In 2014 he published a book called Agitating Images: Photography Against History in Indigenous Siberia. He has been working on ‘future feelings’ and the cultural history of an unbuilt hydro-electric dam in subarctic Krasnoyarsk Krai. He has also been exploring the utility of the concept of ‘borealism’ in the context of Indigenous Siberia. Most recently he mounted an exhibition titled Agit Kino: and tell them we’re for peace in Austin, Texas. He is the lead editor for a photo essay magazine called Writing with Light and one of the directors of the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography. He is Assistant director of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and a member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies advisory council at the University of Texas at Austin.

Light refreshments will be provided at the event.

Description

This talk will draw on Sergey Radchenko’s forthcoming book, To Run the World: the Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power, to explore how the Soviet and Russian leaders formulated and pursued their foreign policy aims during the Cold War, and in its aftermath.

Sergey Radchenko is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has written extensively on the Cold War, nuclear history, and on Russian and Chinese foreign and security policies. He has served as a Global Fellow and a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre and as the Zi Jiang Distinguished Professor at East China Normal University (Shanghai). Professor Radchenko’s books include To Run the World: the Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power (Cambridge UP, forthcoming in 2024), Two Suns in the Heavens: the Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy (Wilson Center Press & Stanford UP, 2009), and Unwanted Visionaries: the Soviet Failure in Asia (Oxford UP, 2014). Professor Radchenko is a native of Sakhalin Island, Russia, was educated in the US, Hong Kong, and the UK, where he received his PhD in 2005 (LSE). Before he joined SAIS, Professor Radchenko worked and lived in Mongolia, China, and Wales.

Description

Book talk with Andrei S. Markovits

In his memoir The Passport as Home: Comfort in Rootlessness (Central European University Press, 2021) that has been translated into German and Romanian, Markovits regales the reader with personal stories that offer insights into the social, political and cultural developments of the second half of the twentieth century in Central Europe and the United States. For the book talk at CERES, Markovits will focus on Germany’s and German culture’s indispensable centrality in the life of a Romanian-born, Hungarian-speaking, Vienna-schooled, Columbia-educated and Harvard-formed, middle-class Jewish professor of politics and other subjects.

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

Description

Despite the achievements in writing a non-Eurocentric world history of decolonization, current scholarship has difficulty situating the Lausanne Treaty of July 1923 into the political transformation of the world in the last one hundred years from the world of empires to its current partition into nation states. The recognition of a sovereign Turkish State at the Lausanne Treaty was hailed by contemporary observers in Asia and Africa as the victory of an Eastern/Muslim nation against Western colonialism. Yet, the Treaty also formalized the legal recognition of the colonization of Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, namely Palestine, Syria, and Iraq, by the British and French empires. Abolishment of the Ottoman Caliphate by the Turkish parliament in March 1924, just seven months after the Lausanne Treaty, further complicates the narratives. While Turkish nationalist historiography marks this as a completion of the Republican revolution, it led to the erasure of a Pan-Islamic political symbol for a globalist world making visions across Asia and Africa aiming to critique and reform the unequal racialized imperial world order. This presentation will explore the contradictions of the 1923 and 1924 moments in the broader context of the role of non-European empires and pan-nationalism in the global history of decolonization.

Seminar in Ottoman and Turkish Studies talk co-sponsored by the Michael E. Marmura Lectures in Arabic Studies.

Description

What happened to all the busts of Philippe Pétain after 1944? What happened to the millions of Vichy collaborationist and Nazi-related posters, busts, insignia, hats, guns, arm bands, calendars, pamphlets, and children’s books that France was awash in by the mid-1940s? Scholarship on contemporary dilemmas posed by WWII-era material culture, including the thriving trade in small-object memorabilia, has recently spiked, while the history of these artifacts’ survival in the final days of WWII, liberation, and postwar rebuilding remains mostly unwritten. This talk will introduce new research exploring pivotal moments in 1944-1950, as Allied occupiers, French leadership, and the population at large struggled to purge the country and continent of “pernicious objects.”

Dr. Sarah Griswold  is Assistant Professor of European History at Oklahoma State University, focusing on modern France

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

Why did Vladimir Putin decide to invade Ukraine? This talk focuses on the mentality of Putin and his close associates that informed the decision for war. To understand decision-making in a personalist dictatorship, it is important to study the personality of the dictator.

Brian D. Taylor is professor of political science and director of the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. Taylor is the author of three books on Russian politics: The Code of Putinism (Oxford University Press, 2018); State Building in Putin’s Russia: Policing and Coercion after Communism (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Politics and the Russian Army: Civil-Military Relations, 1689-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), as well as multiple articles and book chapters. His fourth book, Russian Politics: A Very Short Introduction, is forthcoming this year from Oxford University Press. He received his B.A. from the University of Iowa, an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Description

In 1908 the Tunguska explosion in Siberia knocked down an area of forest larger than London. Most scientists believe that an asteroid or a comet caused the blast, but neither a crater nor unmistakable remnants of a meteorite have ever been found. Over the last century, the mysterious nature of the event has prompted a wide array of speculation and investigation. This presentation will recount the intriguing story of the Tunguska event and the investigations into it, foregrounding the significance of mystery in environmental history.

Andy Bruno works as a Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Northern Illinois University. A specialist in the environmental history of the Soviet Union, he is the author of two books, The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (2016) and Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and its Environmental Legacy (2022).

Description

This presentation discusses social and political effects of the regulation of queer sexuality, paying particular attention to the case of Russia where the “gay propaganda” law (2013) is but one example of instrumentalization of homophobia. First, I set out intellectual tasks for what I call a “queerer criminology”. Since queer criminology simply puts LGBTQ+ subjects at the centre of its inquiry, it lacks ambition of other queer projects which claim to be transgressive and transformative. I argue for the next step to make this branch of criminology queerer. Second, I offer my analysis of more than 300 court rulings of anti-queer violence in Russia on which my book Violent Affections is based. In this analysis I reveal currents of affectionate power relations that manipulate people’s emotions for political gains and control. Hence, third, I aim to find frameworks which would enrich our understanding of crime, Russian politics, and the regulation of sexuality. My ultimate example deals with the amendment of the “gay propaganda” law in 2022 as a means of war effort in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Alexander Sasha Kondakov, PhD, is an assistant professor at the School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Ireland. His truly international experience includes holding positions in the University of Helsinki in Finland, European University at St. Petersburg Russia, Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington DC, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States. Kondakov’s work is primarily focused on law and queer sexualities. His latest research on anti-queer violence concluded with an open-access book ‘Violent Affections: Queer sexuality, techniques of power, and law in Russia’.

Description

Join us for a workshop with the world’s leading experts on the Czech Republic

Barbara J. Falk

Lessons and legacies of Charter 77 for Resistance and Dissent Today

This presentation will focus on three themes: the lesson (or “gift”) of democratic dissent within authoritarian regimes (of which Charter 77 is a prime example); how such dissent could neither be predictive of nor assume the Velvet Revolution in 1989; and finally, how the idea of a “velvet” or non-violent revolution resonates (or does not) elsewhere in the region or the globally since 1989. Specific examples of all three themes will be provided, building on my research and teaching in this area over the last three decades.

James Krapfl

The Solidarity of the Shaken as a Force in European History

In his Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History, the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka noted a phenomenon whereby persons whom violence has shaken out of their everydayness form empathetic bonds in rejection of violence.  He illustrated this “solidarity of the shaken” with testimony from French and German soldiers facing one another on the First World War’s Western Front, noting that it did not succeed then in becoming a force that might change the course of history, but asking whether it might.  It was in the hope of incarnating this possibility that Patočka collaborated in the creation of Charter 77, and “the solidarity of the shaken” proved to be one of Czechoslovak dissidents’ most successful ideas.  Most participants in the Czechoslovak revolution of 1989 understood their mobilization as a response of those shaken by violence in solidarity with its victims.  This presentation will address these and other appearances of the phenomenon as a force in European history, including steps toward European unification after the Second World War, Polish Solidarity, Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, and European responses to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.  Patočka was cautious about what the solidarity of the shaken might accomplish; now that the number of historical examples has multiplied, we can assess how well Patočka’s prognosis has held up – and what the solidarity of the shaken might yet achieve.  

Jiří Přibáň

Human Rights and Legalist Revolutions of 1989: A Case Study of Czech Dissent

This presentation focuses on the evolving strategy of human rights among dissidents and opposition groups in communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. It discusses three aspects of human rights – ethical, political and legal in both national and international contexts. It opens by an analysis of the post-1945 rise of human rights as a common legal and political denominator and then moves to the Helsinki Accords as a decisive breaking point in international politics and support of political dissent. The second part of the presentation focuses on the process of drafting the Charter 77 and the contrast between its legalist format and civic aspirations which increasingly dominated dissident struggles of the 1980s. The perestroika and glasnost policies introduced in the second half of the 1980s are discussed against the background of gradual liberalisation and political transformations in some countries in the communist bloc and persisting repressions in Czechoslovakia leading to the Velvet Revolution in 1989. The revolutionary ethos, again, quickly transformed into legislative efforts and constitutional reforms incorporating human rights, most notably the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms as the material core of a new constitutional democratic order.

Ludger Hagedorn

Solidarity. Remarks on a Buzzword of Eastern European Dissidence  

The concept of solidarity is widely used in intellectual debates and everyday discussions of political issues, but it appears to have manifold meanings, carrying a number of divergent claims and sedimented traditions. Historically, it hovers somewhere between its Roman origins, Christian adaptations, and its heyday in the leftist movements of political and social emancipation. Although the proclamation of solidarity throughout the 19th and 20th centuries became inseparably linked with the international workers’ movement and socialist ideals, it is significant that the very same word obtained an almost emblematic meaning as an anti-communist slogan in Czechoslovakia in the 1970’s and a bit later in the famous Polish movement named Solidarność. The talk will point out conceptual similarities and differences with the ideal of fraternity and highlight Jan Patocka’s “Solidarity of the Shaken” as a communal bond that is not built on the firm ground of any shared identity but rather on existential upheaval.

Roman Krakovsky

The crisis of Communism and the practice of political autonomy

The crisis of the social contract in Eastern European countries during the 1970s and 1980s can be understood, in the context of the Cold War, as the triggering factor for the eventual disintegration of the bloc. The writings and actions of democratic opposition and self-organizing workers since the late 1950s offer an alternative perspective: a contemplation of the practice of political autonomy and the emergence of political subjectivity. The exercise of individual rights by citizens indeed sets in motion a self-stabilizing cycle where the public and private use of political autonomy mutually reinforce each other. This process ultimately leads to a self-determined life, where citizens confer their rights upon themselves.

Light refreshments will be provided.

Description

Terrell will talk about what it is like to cover Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine as an independent reporter, how being Black correspondent informs his work and what Ukraine means for the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election.

Terrell Jermaine Starr is an independent journalist widely known for his coverage of the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. He’s the founder of the newly-formed Black Diplomats Media Group that includes Black Diplomats newsletter on Substack, Black Diplomats Official YouTube channel and Black Diplomats podcast that will resume broadcasting mid-February and is available on Apple iTunes and all major podcast platforms.

Terrell’s work centers the Black perspective in foreign policy news and doesn’t shy away from inserting his personal views into his reporting when he talks about Ukraine, Gaza or any other part of the world. He is also looking for financial supporters to back his media group, so if you want to back his vision, please reach out to him via the contact information on the screen.

A former Fulbright grantee, Terrell also is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, having served in Georgia in 2003 to 2005. He has masters degrees in Journalism and Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies from the University of Illinois and a bachelor’s degree from Philander Smith College, a historically Black College in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Terrell is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and divides his time between New York City and Ukraine.

Description

Russian war showed that there is no limit to violence when it comes to genocidal conquest. It also showed the Ukrainian resilience and the power of ordinary citizens in resisting the invaders. In her first book, Anna Romandash collected testimonies of this resilience from different parts of Ukraine. Her work is a set of 33 reportages of extraordinary women who had to face the war, deal with loss of loved ones, and showed courage before the toughest circumstances. The heroines are soldiers, volunteers, psychologists, educators, and many others – who had to experience the double burden of the war as Ukrainians and women.

This talk is about what it was like collecting these testimonies, and how women managed to share their stories despite having to relive traumas of the recent past. Romandash will talk about her work as a journalist in many dangerous areas across Ukraine, the specifics of working with vulnerable communities, and the need to give more space to the experiences of women whose individual struggles often go unnoticed amid the national tragedy.  

Anna Romandash is an award-winning journalist from Ukraine and an author of "Women of Ukraine: Reportages from the War and Beyond". She has extensive experience working across Eastern Europe and Central Asia where she researched democratization processes, freedom movements, and human rights violations. Her areas of interest include international security, Eastern Europe, sanctions, and energy transition. Romandash is the Fourth Freedom Forum’s first Howard S. Brembeck Fellow, a Research Affiliate at the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College, and a digital scholar at Vassar College. She holds an MGA degree from the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She is a 2023-2024 Petro Jacyk Non-Residential Scholar.

Description

A work in progress and the first of its kind, this presentation gives a sneak peek of Dr. Robin Mitchell’s forthcoming book based on Suzanne Simon Baptiste, also known as Madame Toussaint Louverture. Dr. Mitchell’s goal in this research is to bring Suzanne to the center stage and not in the shadow of her husband, Toussaint Louverture, where she has been stuck for most of history.

Robin Mitchell is an Associate Professor of European History in the Department of History at the University at Buffalo. She is a 19th century French historian, specializing in discourses about race, gender, and sexuality. Her work focuses on the white colonial fantasies, scandals, and crime imposed upon Black women’s bodies and voices when they were in metropolitan French spaces. Mitchell has published numerous journal articles, and her first book, Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Georgia Press, 2020), was named by the African American Intellectual History Society to its "The Best Black History books of 2020," and by The Guardian as one of "The Best Books About Sex" in 2021.

Description

This talk presents the emerging themes from a larger book project on China’s relationship-building with African elites through training programs and immersive experiences sponsored by the Chinese government. Drawing on rich empirical data, including interviews and ethnographic observations in China and Ethiopia, this study challenges the popular depictions of China as exporting its model to developing countries. Instead, it demonstrates the dynamic and multi-directional co-optation, persuasion, and disciplining efforts aimed at African elites. The talk highlights how these efforts yield both, a public acknowledgment and even promotion of China by the participants, as well as somewhat ambivalent private reflections about China and its future in Africa. 

Maria Repnikova is an expert on Chinese political communication, an Associate Professor in Global Communication, and the inaugural William C. Pate Chair in Strategic Communication at Georgia State University. This year, she is also a non-residential Wilson China Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. She has written widely on China’s media politics, including propaganda, critical journalism, digital nationalism, and soft power. Dr. Repnikova is the author of the award-winning book, Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism (Cambridge 2017), as well as the recent, Chinese Soft Power (Cambridge Global China Element Series). Her public writings have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Atlantic, amongst other outlets. Other than working on China, Repnikova does comparative work on information politics in China and Russia. Most recently, she has been researching and completing a monograph on Chinese soft power in Africa, with a focus on Ethiopia. Dr. Repnikova holds a doctorate in politics from Oxford University where she was a Rhodes Scholar. In the past, she was a Wilson Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center (2020-2021), a visiting fellow at the African Studies Center at Beijing University (2019), and a post-doctoral fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication (2014-2016).

Description

The modern Greek monarchical state, initially in effect absolutist, was reshaped by two moments of revolt: 1843, when the king was forced to grant a constitution sanctioning a national parliament; and 1862, when he was forced to abdicate, opening the way for a new constitutional process, the election of a new king, and the promulgation of a new, remarkably liberal constitution. Although both these processes led to important political transformations and were instrumental for the formation of the early Greek state, they have received surprising little attention from historians. This lecture seeks to turn this state of affairs around by revisiting these moments, and by locating them in the political and intellectual context of their era – both domestic and international. In so doing, it aims to shed new light on how and why these transformations came about; assess the liberal language that informed them, and was informed by them; and evaluate the short-term and long-term effects of these liberal transformations, and their significance for our understanding of the history of modern Greece.

About the Speaker

Michalis Sotiropoulos, FRHistS, is a historian of modern Europe specializing in the intellectual history of the Mediterranean and the Greek world in the long nineteenth century. Michalis has earned a PhD from the University of London and is currently the 1821 Fellow in Modern Greek Studies at the British School of Athens, while in October 2024, he will join the University of Edinburgh as a Lecturer in Modern Greek Studies. His publications include studies of the Greek Revolution of 1821, on law and the formation of states, and on the historiography on the Age of Revolutions, while his monograph Liberalism after the Revolution: The Intellectual Foundations of the Greek State, ca. 1830-1880 was recently published by Cambridge University Press.

Sponsored by the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, the Hellenic Studies Initiative at University of Toronto, the HHF Chair in Modern Greek Studies at York University, the Graduate Diploma in European Studies at York University, and the Hellenic Canadian Academic Association of Ontario.

Description

Join a workshop with top experts on Hungary and Central Europe to examine issues central to Hungary in the twentieth  and twenty – first centuries.

Attendees are cordially invited to join us for a book launch directly following the workshop (5:00PM-7:00PM), showcasing "Survival under Dictatorships Life and Death in Nazi and Communist Regimes" with author László Borhi.

 Refreshments will be provided.  

László Borhi

Revolution and Regime Change in History – The case of Hungary, 1956 and 1989

Karl Marx posited that revolutions occur when the ruling classes cannot rule the old way and the people cannot be ruled the old way. In fact, revolutions are not governed by any law of history. Sometimes they happen when they are not supposed to and sometimes they don’t when they are supposed to. Why did the only violent revolution behind the iron curtain happen in Hungary and what was, if any, the relationship between 1956 and the so called “negotiated revolution”, a trailblazing event in the collapse of communism and the end of the cold war? Why did the 1989 transition happen and why did it remain peaceful? This contribution will attempt to identify unique features in Hungary and how they combined. Both 1956 and 1989 had a dual purpose: to remove foreign domination and to change the system of government. Talk will make the case that the key to success was whether the rulers had an incentive to surrender power. 

Constantin Iordachi

Condemning vs. Remembering Communism: Memorial Museums of Communism in Global Perspective

The lecture will explore dominant master narratives over the communist past and the way they are implemented and “institutionalized” in museums of the Second World War and of communism, as part of more general governmental campaigns on “politics of history” in post-communist Eastern Europe. It will survey a sum of the most representative museums of the Second World War and of communism in Eastern Europe, by inserting them into a larger comparison with global trends in museum, with a focus on communist regimes in Cuba, China, and North Korea, but also with memorial museums emerging around the world, from North and South America to Africa and Asia. Special attention will be given to patterns of historical representation, capitalizing on a set of antithetic emotions, such as universalism vs. parochialism, pro- vs. anti-European feelings, attitudes of collaboration and accommodation vs. heroic resistance, and the pedagogy of “shame” and stigma versus the pedagogy of national pride, charisma, and messianic nationalism. 

Roman Krakovsky

Hungary and Central and Eastern Europe as a “crisis zone of Europe”

The emergence of illiberal democracies in Central Europe, particularly in Hungary and Poland, is commonly attributed to the transition from communism to capitalism and liberal democracy. However, viewed through a long-term historical lens, Viktor Orban’s attempt to reshape the political community along illiberal lines represents a new phase in the enduring series of crises that this region has faced since the late 19th century. This ongoing historical context positions the area as a “crisis zone of Europe,” shedding light on the complexities of its political evolution and diverging from the conventional narrative of post-communist transitions. 

Susan Papp

The Politics of Exclusion in the Hungarian Film Industry, 1929-1956

This presentation is about how the interwar and postwar governments in Hungary politicized and shaped the film industry to do their bidding and how filmmakers, actors and actresses reacted to those political pressures. The archival files of the postwar certification committees provide significant historical insight into the leadership and political narrative of the entertainment industry. The political trials that unfolded in the late 1940s served the position and power of the new elites more than anything else. By the early 1950s, the Cold War took precedence over retribution following the Second World War. This work notably adds to the research and discussion of how to shape, and for what purpose, a nation’s memory of the war and postwar years.

Attila Pók

1968, a Flashpoint between 1956 and 1989?

Pók will give a short summary of the major events of 1968, from the  perspective of a member of the so called 1968-er generation, himself. He will argue that 1968 was a historical  turning point in the history of Hungarian statehood but as A.J. P. Taylor put it  in connection with 1848: history came to a turning point but failed to turn. This topic is part of a longer term research on The Fourth Reform Generation in Hungary, i.e. reform efforts of various segments of the Hungarian cultural, economic political elite from  the mid 1950s to the late 1980s.   

Description

Since the 1970s, a large amount of scholarship has analyzed the prediction of risks in early and modern European societies. Building on the concepts of “risk societies” and cultural theories of risk perception, this workshop explores how risk, originally an economic prediction appearing with the birth of capitalism and global industrialization, permeated every aspect of society, from individual decision-making to artistic and scientific practices and state policies. This workshop aims develop the existing scholarship, bringing scholars from different disciplines whose work focuses on France and the Francophone world.

Further event details and program available here: https://crrs.ca/crrsevents/conceptualizing-uncertainty/

Speakers

Hayden Bytheway, University of Toronto

Ursula Carmichael, Independent Scholar

Constance de Font-Réaulx, University of Toronto

Marianne Guernet, University of Toronto

Magdalene Klassen, Johns Hopkins University

Nicole Liao, University of Toronto

Pierre Marty, University of Toronto

Jason Nguyen, University of Toronto

Margaret Schotte, York University

Samantha Wesner, University of Toronto

Description

This project explores the most recent famine in Soviet and European History, which killed at least one million people in 1946-47, mostly in Ukraine and Moldova, but about which we know very little. The Soviet state repressed news of the 1946/47 famine at the time, and it remains largely absent in English-language scholarship and relatively neglected in Russian and Ukrainian scholarship compared to the Holodomor of 1932/33.  Our project operates from archival sources across the former Soviet space to explore the interaction of numerous factors in understanding famine causation, duration, mortality, and its broader consequences, which endured for decades afterward.

Speakers:

Filip Slaveski, Senior Lecturer in Russian/Soviet and East European History, Australian National University.

An historian of Soviet Empire, primarily of Ukraine and Russia, his work focuses on the collisions of mass conflict, famine and political repression, their aftermath and contemporary echoes across the former Soviet space.

Hiroaki Kuromiya, Emeritus Professor in History, Indiana University, Bloomington

Japanese-American historian, Emeritus professor in the Department of History, University of Indiana, studies modern and contemporary Ukraine in a wider context of Eurasian history. He has written on the Donbas, historical and contemporary, the Holodomor, the Great Terror, and other subjects mainly during the Stalin era. His publications include books Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990s, The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s, and The Eurasian Triangle: Russia, the Caucasus, and Japan, 1904-1945 (with Georges Mamoulia), as well as numerous articles.

Moderator: Bohdan Klid, Director of Research, Holodomor Research and Education Consosrtium, CIUS, University of Alberta

Description

The transformation of the Ottoman janissary corps from a slave army to a major social group in civilian urban spaces has been well recognized by historians. From the late sixteenth century onwards, they entered guilds, opened coffeehouses, and turned to civilian channels of justice for their disputes, especially the qadi courts. Nevertheless, the impact of this transformation on their traditional status as “slaves of the sultan” remains obscure. Were they slave, free, or experiencing another form of unfreedom entirely? What can sharia court records of the period tell us about their status in relation to their civilian activities? This presentation will examine how janissaries appear in the Istanbul records and what these appearances reveal about their stature in the wider community.

Description

Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar (1864-1944) was a prominent Turkish author in the late Ottoman and early republican Turkey, and now, for the first time, one of his most popular novels, Gulyabani (Ghoulyabânî), originally published in 1913, is available in English translation. A group of University of Toronto alumni have turned what was once a student club of literature enthusiasts in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations into a publishing house, and have just released their second book.

Come join the founders of Translation Attached publishing house, UofT alumni Nefise Kahraman, Karolina Dejnicka, and Yasemin Mangal, as they discuss the life and times of Gürpınar, the enduring appeal of Ghoulyabânî, and the journey of publishing the novel in English translation.