Description

During the Interwar period (1918-1939), Czechoslovak-Yugoslav relations were influenced by a complex web of political, economic, and ideological factors within the broader European context. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia emerged as new nation-states after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and their interactions reflected the challenges and opportunities faced by many European countries in the aftermath of World War I. During this period, they had rich political, economic, and cultural relations and were among the main pillars of the post-war French security system in Central and South-East Europe.

About the Speaker

Milan Balaban is a historian, he completed his bachelor’s studies at the University of Banja Luka and pursued master’s and doctoral studies at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. His doctoral dissertation focused on "Yugoslav-Czechoslovak Economic Relations between 1918-1938." Notably, Milan Balaban received recognition for his dissertation work when he was awarded the best work on the economic history of the Balkans in 2016. His academic career has included positions at the Department of History in Banja Luka, and since 2015, he has been employed as a scientific researcher and historian at the Bata Information Centre at Tomas Bata University in Zlin, Czech Republic.

Balaban’s primary research areas encompass the history of the Bata Company and Czechoslovak-Yugoslav economic relations. He has contributed to academic scholarship by publishing numerous articles in Czech and foreign scientific journals. Additionally, he has authored and co-authored books, including "The Bata Company in Yugoslavia" (published in 2018) and "Bata Across Continents" (published in 2022).

His research and expertise have taken him to various academic institutions worldwide, including the Czech Republic, France, Greece, the Netherlands, India, Canada, and former Yugoslavia. His work has contributed significantly to understanding economic and historical relations between Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as the history of the Bata Company.

Description

The story of the Bata Company is a remarkable tale of entrepreneurial vision, global expansion, and the establishment of a unique social and economic system. Founded by Tomáš Baťa in Zlín, Austria-Hungary (now in the Czech Republic) in 1894, the company embarked on a transformative journey that turned it into the world’s largest shoemaking producer in the second half of the 20th century.

About the Speaker

Milan Balaban is a historian, he completed his bachelor’s studies at the University of Banja Luka and pursued master’s and doctoral studies at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. His doctoral dissertation focused on "Yugoslav-Czechoslovak Economic Relations between 1918-1938." Notably, Milan Balaban received recognition for his dissertation work when he was awarded the best work on the economic history of the Balkans in 2016. His academic career has included positions at the Department of History in Banja Luka, and since 2015, he has been employed as a scientific researcher and historian at the Bata Information Centre at Tomas Bata University in Zlin, Czech Republic.

Balaban’s primary research areas encompass the history of the Bata Company and Czechoslovak-Yugoslav economic relations. He has contributed to academic scholarship by publishing numerous articles in Czech and foreign scientific journals. Additionally, he has authored and co-authored books, including "The Bata Company in Yugoslavia" (published in 2018) and "Bata Across Continents" (published in 2022).

His research and expertise have taken him to various academic institutions worldwide, including the Czech Republic, France, Greece, the Netherlands, India, Canada, and former Yugoslavia. His work has contributed significantly to understanding economic and historical relations between Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as the history of the Bata Company.

Description

Alex Averbuch will read, in the original Ukrainian and in English translation, from his latest book Zhydivsky korol (The Jewish King, a 2023 finalist for the Shevchenko National Prize, Ukraine’s highest award for culture and literature), and answer questions from the audience. Averbuch’s poetry deals with interwoven Jewish-Ukrainian relations through the prism of his family history and Ukraine’s multiethnic past and present. The book features poeticized documentary materials related to the Second World War: letters by Ukrainian Ostarbeiters sent to their relatives in Ukraine, interwoven with letters by Jewish Holocaust survivors who returned to devastated villages in Ukraine in search of their murdered relatives, as well as poems about the Russo-Ukrainian war currently taking place in his home region of Luhans’k. Unsettling but ultimately liberatory de-specifications of ethnos, language, and sexuality relieve trigger-points in Ukraine’s history through the confessional intimacy of family, shame, pleasure, and the reconciliation of self and other.

About the Speaker

Alex Averbuch, a poet, translator, and scholar, is the author of three books of poetry and an array of literary translations between Hebrew, Ukrainian, English, and Russian. English translations of his poems have appeared in the Manhattan Review, Copper Nickel, Plume, Birmingham Poetry Review, Words Without Borders, Sugar House Review, Constellations, and Common Knowledge. Averbuch is active in promoting Ukrainian-Jewish relations. He has translated into Hebrew and published over thirty selections of poetry by contemporary Ukrainian poets. Currently he is compiling and editing an anthology of contemporary Ukrainian poetry in Hebrew translation. Averbuch is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Davis Center, and soon to be a research fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. He has a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures and Jewish Studies from the University of Toronto.

Media coverage, interviews:

– CBC, an interview on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and The Jewish King

– Relieving the Terrible Knots ofHistory: An Interview with Alex Averbuch

– An interview on poetry and intercultural relations between Ukrainians and Jews, Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter

– An interview with Ukrainian Hromadske radio on Ukrainian Jewry, the Russo-Ukrainian war

Description

The lecture will focus on cyber risks and international response strategies. In an era of unprecedented technological transformation, AI, cloud computing, IoT, 5G, and ever-evolving digitization, we face a landscape that has brought a wave of cyber threats that demand our immediate attention.

This talk will begin with a discussion of the Western collective response strategy to counter malicious cyber activity, highlighting the importance of global cooperation and collaboration in mitigating these threats. We will explore the Estonian government’s proposal for an international cyber coalition to help Ukraine address digital threats, and offer insights into how we can collectively address both current and next-generation cyber challenges that transcend borders.

In addition, we will examine strategies to increase our agility in responding to adversaries who exploit vulnerabilities in cyberspace. In a world where the cyber battlefield knows no boundaries, it is imperative that we understand and adapt to emerging threats. Drawing on lessons learned from cyber activities in Ukraine, this presentation will provide valuable real-world context and insight into the evolving landscape of cyber warfare and how nations can best protect their interests in an interconnected world.

About the Speaker:

Heli Tiirmaa-Klaar is Director of Digital Society Institute at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin since January 2022. She was serving as Ambassador for Cyber Diplomacy and Director General for the Cyber Diplomacy Department at the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2018-2021, where she led the Estonian efforts to promote norms of responsible state behavior in cyberspace at the United Nations Security Council. Up to Fall 2018, she was working as a Head of Cyber Policy Coordination at the European External Action Service where she steered and coordinated EU external relations on cyber issues and co-led preparations of European Cyber Security Strategies since 2012. She set up EU strategic cyber dialogues with the US, India, Brazil, Japan, South Korea as well as other international organisations. She also kicked off EU global cyber capacity building programs and steered the development of the EU Cyber Diplomacy Toolbox to bolster EU response to malicious cyber activities. In 2011, she was assigned to the NATO International Staff to prepare the NATO Cyber Defence Policy.

She has been working on cyber security since 2007 when she led the development of the Estonian Cyber Security Strategy. In 2008-2010 she coordinated the implementation of the Estonian strategy, managed the National Cyber Security Council and led the establishment of Estonia’s national cyber resilience structures as well as building public-private partnerships for cyber security. In her earlier career, she held various managerial positions at the Estonian Ministry of Defence and the Tallinn University since 1995. She was a Fulbright Scholar at the George Washington University and has published in several academic journals throughout her career.

Description

Everyone knows who won Brexit. But not everyone knows how. Behind the Rasputin-like manoeuvring of Boris Johnson’s master strategist Dominic Cummings, lies an entire strata of respectable British political science which has all too readily conceptualised, mapped, measured and confirmed the new political alignment and its consequences that Cummings (and others) carried to victory in the UK in June 2016 and December 2019. Presenting a Bourdieusian spin on the mainstream public opinion scholarship that constitutes the field of "Brexitology" and its powerful doxa, I offer an alternative explanation of Brexit and after that may have significant parallels elsewhere where "populist" insurgence has shaken the foundations of "liberal democracy".

Description

A brown-bag lunchtime workshop on turning historical research into creative and narrative non-fiction. All members of the department are welcome, but the event will be aimed at graduate students. Our guest, Linda Kinstler, is a journalist and scholar whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and many other publications. She is also the editor of the online magazine The Dial and the author of the book Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends (Public Affairs/Hachette, 2022). In 2023, she received a Ph.D. from the Rhetoric Department at University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation on the genealogy of legal oblivion. Kinstler will draw on her experience as a journalist, editor, and scholar to address how to write and publish research-based work for a general audience. This will include discussion of craft and form, as well as publishing strategies and how to most effectively pitch stories to editors.

This event is designed for university faculty, staff, and graduate students.

Attendance is limited to registered participants only.  

Description

Zoltán Kodály’s most important compositions have their roots not only in the Hungarian folksongs, but also in the music of Palestrina and the great literary works of his homeland. Delivered on the occasion of the centenary of the monumental oratorio Psalmus Hungaricus, this talk presents the chief sources of Kodály’s inspiration and reflects on the significance of his unique creative attitude.

Gabor Csepregi is currently a visiting scholar at St. Paul’s College, University of Manitoba, and at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest, Hungary. He is past president of Université de Saint-Boniface (Winnipeg) and of Dominican University College (Ottawa). His scholarly works focuses on the central questions of philosophical anthropology, especially on the phenomenological analysis of the body, time, music, play, and education. His latest book, Attitudes of Play, has been published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2022.

Sponsored by CERES, Hungarian Studies Program, and Hungarian Research Institute of Canada  

Description

In the Soviet Union official humor was a propaganda tool for instituting communist ideology and governing society. This talk will focus on the founding and institutionalization of the satire and humor magazine “Broom” that was at the center of the official humor culture in Soviet Lithuania. It will argue that Soviet Lithuanian laughter was multidirectional, ideologically correct and oppositional. Paradoxically, while official humor institutions involved people in co-governance through the intimacy of laughter, they also created critical publics who shared dystopian visions of Soviet modernity via authoritarian state sponsored venues. The “Broom” itself became a forum for criticism that was mobilized in anti-Soviet revolutionary laughter in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

About the speaker

Neringa Klumbytė is Professor of Anthropology and Russian and Post-Soviet Studies and Director of the Lithuania Program at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, Miami University. She is the author of Authoritarian Laughter: Political Humor and Soviet Dystopia in Lithuania (2022, Cornell University Press); a co-author of Social and Historical Justice in Multiethnic Lithuania (2018, Vilnius) and co-editor of Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964–85 (2012, with Gulnaz Sharafutdinova). Her current projects focus on the Holocaust, sovereignty, and historical justice in Lithuania.

Description

A sitting member of the German Parliament and a member of the Free Democratic Party, Coordinator Link is responsible for Germany’s relationship with Canada and the United States. The talk will examine Germany’s relationship with the two countries: the values they share and the issues that unite – and divide –  them.

About the Speaker

Michael Georg Link has been serving as the German Federal Government’s Coordinator of Transatlantic Cooperation at the Federal Foreign Office since March 2022.

His focus as Coordinator is on deepening political relations with the U.S. and Canada, on both the federal and the state or provincial level respectively. He also works to increase transatlantic people-to-people contact, especially by promoting exchange programs for young people from all walks of life.

Link is a Member of the German Bundestag where, now in his fourth legislative term, he represents the Free Democratic Party (FDP) for his home electoral district, Heilbronn, Baden-Württemberg. Link is Deputy Chairperson of the Parliamentary Group of the Free Democrats, where he is responsible for international affairs and defense policy.

He has extensive experience in international relations, having previously served as Minister of State at the Federal Foreign Office (2012-2013) and as Director of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) (2014-2017). He is also a member of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, of the party council of the European Liberals (ALDE), and of the FDP national executive board in his capacity as party treasurer.

Description

The Battle of Haçova/Mezőkeresztes in Memory and Myth

On 25 October 1596, an Ottoman army engaged an imperial force on the plain of Mezőkeresztes (Trk. Haçova). On the second day, in disarray and routed, Ottoman forces rallied to drive the enemy back and win an unexpected, total victory. The battle went down in legend. Witnesses and later authors claimed that something wondrous had happened that day, something miraculous, and ranked it above even the great victories at Çaldıran (1514) and Mohács (1526). The outcome, they said, was clearly “no work of man (sun‘-ı beşer degildür).” This talk explores sources’ miraculous interpretations of Haçova. It draws on accounts from the 16th to 19th centuries to argue that the battle was a sort of protean event and to show how Haçova took on distinct “political theologies” over time, serving as a symbol for how groups within the elite thought about the polity and its relationship with the divine.

Description

https://www.routledge.com/The-Turkic-Peoples-in-World-History/Lee/p/book/9781032170015

This new publication is a thorough and rare introduction to the Turkic world and its role in world history, providing a concise history of the Turkic peoples as well as a critical discussion of their identities and origins.  The “Turks” stepped on to the stage of history by establishing the Türk Qaghanate, the first trans-Eurasian empire in history, in 552 CE. In the following millennium, they went on to create empires that had a profound impact on world history such as the Uyghur, Khazar, and Ottoman empires. They also participated in building the Mongol empire, and these Turko-Mongol empires are credited with shaping the destinies of pre-modern China, the Middle East, and Europe. By treating the history of the Turkic peoples as a process of amalgamation and integration, rather than simply categorizing the Turkic peoples chronologically or geographically, this book offers new insights into Turkic history.

Description

Between people and the environment, between inside and outside, not only the skin but also the clothing above it serves as an important protection and mediator. Fashion, in turn, represents the expansion of one’s own identity and can be distinguished from the functional concept of clothing. On the one hand, fashion itself should be understood as a medium in its dimension that conveys meaning; on the other hand, fashion is a textile shell that, since its commercialization, has also been deeply intertwined with existing media technologies. The article takes this ambivalence as a starting point and would like to look at fashion and its media implications and dependencies from three perspectives: Firstly, the surveillance character of smart fashion should be questioned. Secondly, fashionable case studies will be reflected from the perspective of sur/subveillance mechanisms and finally a collection with anti-surveillance efforts will be considered.

About the Speaker

Silke Roesler-Keilholz is a research assistant at the Chair of Media Studies at the University of Regensburg. In her habilitation project (3rd book) with the working title “Rhizomatic Subveillance. SurveillanceArchitecture(s)”, she expands the spatial theoretical reflection of her dissertation “Doing City. New York in the field of tension between media practices” (published in 2010) by a topological dimension. Current fields of work include what she calls the theory of subveillance, aesthetics of postfeminism, spatial theories and fashion media studies.

Description

The talk explores the perspectives of the Republic of Turkey on translation throughout its first century and uses six national publishing congresses and their printed reports and/or minutes as evidence for tracing the trajectory of translation, as an activity, profession, and a cultural and educational instrument. I will argue that the "official" view on translation took a series of turns which were all closely aligned with national political concerns.

Description

This talk was based on a book that Dr. Zaloznaya was currently writing about the political language and the channels of influence that anti-corruptionism (or efforts to combat corruption) generates on geopolitical arena. The book’s empirical analysis focuses on wartime Ukraine and its interactions with its international partners, such as the United States and the European Union, as well as its adversaries (primarily, Russia), as an ultimate “laboratory” for the geopolitics of anti-corruptionism.  Relying on in-depth interviews with anti-corruption experts in Ukraine and abroad, INGO reports, and media analyses, it explores how and why  fighting corruption has become the main focus of the Ukrainian civil society after the Revolution of Dignity of 2014. Next, the book (and the talk) traces the development of several channels of geo-political pressure via anti-corruptionism, including the transformation of Ukraine’s grass-roots anti-corruption groups into quasi-state actors with extensive domestic and international negotiating powers, inclusion of Western actors onto the boards of Ukrainian state-owned enterprises, and imposition of invasive transparency requirements on Ukraine’s major political and economic processes. Lastly, the book, and the talk, consider the ways whereby the Ukrainian government relies on anti-corruptionism to communicate with its constituents and with foreign governments, and how this symbolic politics of anti-corruptionism contributes to the emergence of Ukraine’s new national identity during the war.

Marina Zaloznaya joined the University of Iowa’s Sociology & Criminology faculty in 2012 and Iowa Political Science faculty in 2021, after she received a Master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University. Since 2022, she has also served as the Director of the European Studies Group at the University of Iowa, and the Executive Director of the Corruption in the Global South Research Consortium.

Dr. Zaloznaya’s research explores public sector corruption, political behavior, and gender in non-democratic regimes from a range of methodological perspectives, including ethnography, survey methods, comparative-historical, and network analyses. Her first book, The Politics of Bureaucratic Corruption (Cambridge University Press 2017) analyzed the impact of hybrid political systems in Ukraine and Belarus on petty corruption in local universities. In a more recent project, funded by two grants from the U.S. Department of Defense, Dr. Zaloznaya and her collaborators carried out a series of national representative surveys in Russia, China, Ukraine, and Georgia. Using these rich data, they analyzed individual-level causes, social network properties, and gendered patterns of public sector corruption. Results of these analyses have appeared in a range of top academic journals, including Post-Soviet Affairs, Europe-Asia Studies, Social Forces, American Review of Sociology, Electoral Studies, Sociology of Development, Theoretical Criminology, and so on. Dr. Zaloznaya is also a co-author of a forthcoming agenda-setting edited volume on Sociology of Corruption (Cambridge University Press), and a research monograph, entitled Street-Level Corruption and Post-Communist Governance: Citizen-Bureaucrat Encounters in Russia, China, Ukraine, and Georgia.

Description

This is an online event.

Interested in the Master of Arts Degree in European and Russian Affairs? Do you want to study the histories, politics, economies, and societies of Europe, Russia, and Eurasia with world-renowned scholars? Are you interested in a funded international summer internship or a semester of study abroad?

Recognized as one of the best of its kind in North America, the two-year Master of Arts program offered at the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies offers students the opportunity to pursue a comprehensive, rigorous, and hands-on degree at Canada’s leading research university.

Join us virtually for the CERES MA Open House on Wednesday, January 10, 12 – 1 pm. Learn about admissions and meet CERES faculty and students.

Apply by February 1, 2024 to be considered for funding: https://archive.munkschool.utoronto.ca/ceres-ma/how-apply

Description

The vast majority of private construction works in the world are created without the participation of an architect. The public sector, through law and regulation, has opened the way for architects to provide services to both the public and private sectors. However, just respecting legal standards and regulations is not enough to produce high quality architecture. The key to achieving quality is to compare the best work that can be produced on a given subject, in this respect the Czech Republic, a small country in the centre of Europe, is an exception that democratises the process of procuring architectural services and allows transparent access to all architects on public contracts. It is a programme occupying a small percentage of contracts, but with an increasing tendency to appeal not only to domestic but also to foreign architects.

Igor Kovačević is a lecturer at VŠUP and North Carolina State University. He has been involved in a number of international projects and is active as an architect, urban planner, curator and theorist. By focusing on urbanity as such, CCEA develops new forms of communication between architects and other disciplines, artists, theorists, political representation, urban planners, sociologists, and other professions. Kovačević sits on juries of national and international competitions and leads the CCEA’s architectural competitions group.

Description

Interested in the Master of Arts Degree in European and Russian Affairs? Have questions about the application or supporting documents? Join us virtually for the CERES MA Q&A for Prospective Students on Thursday, January 18, 4 – 5 pm. Associate Director Robert Austin and Program Coordinator Katia Malyuzhinets will be happy to answer your questions.

Description

This talk is based on a paper written by Amanda Gregg (co-authored with Amy Dayton and Steven Nafziger). The paper investigates how the rules that corporations wrote for themselves related to their financing and performance in an environment characterized by poor investor protections, Imperial Russia. We present new data on detailed governance provisions from Imperial Russian corporate charters, which we connect to a comprehensive panel database of corporate balance sheets from 1899 to 1914. This investigation reveals the tradeoffs weighed by Imperial Russian corporations and demonstrates the surprising flexibility that Russian corporations enjoyed, conditional on obtaining a corporate charter.

Amanda Gregg is Associate Professor of Economics at Middlebury College. She joined Middlebury in 2015 after completing her Ph.D. in Economics at Yale University. Her research concerns industrial development, productivity, and commercial law in Late Imperial Russia. Recent publications include “Factory Productivity and the Concession System of Incorporation in Late Imperial Russia" in the American Economic Review and “Capital Structure and Corporate Performance in Late Imperial Russia” with Steven Nafziger in the European Review of Economic History.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

Beauty was political in the late Ottoman period. This presentation questions how and why beauty shifted from a personal and private aesthetic matter into a public, gendered, scienticized, and medicalized arena equated with civic duty and patriotism in the nineteenth century.

Description

While detectives and forensic experts have long examined fibres, footprints and clothing, which provide important clues as to the identities of victims and perpetrators, the value of this “trace evidence” has been overshadowed by other technologies, including DNA analysis. Yet clothing played a key and often forgotten role in many forms of personal and state identification. This talk takes us back to the origins of so-called “scientific policing” and forensic analysis as they were emerging as more formalized disciplines in France. Professor Alison Matthews David will share original research from my SSHRC-funded Fabric of Crime project, including work on the missing persons registers or “disparus” of the Paris Morgue, which contain surprisingly colourful scraps of working-class dress, the blood-soaked nightwear of the 1847 Choiseul-Praslin assassination, the domestic servants’ wardrobes hoarded by Dumollard the serial “Maid-Killer” in the early 1860s, and L’affaire de la Rue Princesse (1869), in which the tailor Beauvoir murdered and dismembered one of his clients. The talk will also provide a sneak preview of our co-curated exhibition Exhibit A: Investigating Footwear and Crime, opening soon at the Bata Shoe Museum (April 2024).

Description

Serhiy Bilenky will present his new book Laboratory of Modernity Ukraine between Empire and Nation, 1772–1914

When the powers of Europe were at their prime, present-day Ukraine was divided between the Austrian and Russian empires, each imposing different political, social, and cultural models on its subjects. This inevitably led to great diversity in the lives of its inhabitants, shaping modern Ukraine into the multiethnic country it is today.

Making innovative use of methods of social and cultural history, gender studies, literary theory, and sociology, Laboratory of Modernity explores the history of Ukraine throughout the long nineteenth century and offers a unique study of its pluralistic society, culture, and political scene. Despite being subjected to different and conflicting power models during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ukraine was not only imagined as a distinct entity with a unique culture and history but was also realized as a set of social and political institutions. The story of modern Ukraine is geopolitically complex, encompassing the historical narratives of several major communities – including ethnic Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, and Russians – who for centuries lived side by side.

The first comprehensive study of nineteenth-century Ukraine in English, Laboratory of Modernity traces the historical origins of some of the most pressing issues facing Ukraine and the international community today.

The book can be accessed here: https://www.mqup.ca/laboratory-of-modernity-products-9780228017578.php

Serhiy Bilenky is a research associate at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta.