Description

Dragica Rajčić was born in Split, in former Yugoslavia, in 1959. After a short stay in Brisbane, Australia, Rajčić relocated with her young family to St. Gallen, Switzerland in 1978. During the ensuing ten years, she was employed in a series of manual labour and service sector jobs such as cleaning woman,waitress, and homeworker. Her first collection of poetry in German Halbgedichte einer Gastfrau was widely reviewed and brought her instant recognition as a so-called immigrant writer. (The term “Gastfrau” is an elegant play on words exposing the hypocrisy behind the euphemistically-termed
Gastarbeiterliteratur, “the literature of guest workers”.)
After Rajčić’s return to her Croatian residence in Kaštel Stari in 1988, she founded the literary journal Glas Kastela and worked as a journalist during the months leading up to the outbreak of the war. In 1991, she escaped the war-torn country and returned to St. Gallen.
Since then, Dragica Rajčić has published four poetry collections (including short prose) and has written two theatre plays. Her most recent publication is entitled Warten auf Broch. Text über Text (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2011). Rajčić continues to work as a journalist and newspaper editor, while
doing youth work and offering creative writings seminars.

Description

Nicolas LEVRAT obtained a PhD in International Law in 1992 from the University of Geneva. He worked as a civil servant for the Council of Europe from 1991 to 1995 and was Professor at the Free University of Brussels from 1998 to 2001. Since 2001 he has been Professor at the Law Faculty of the University of Geneva. He has served as the Director of the European Institute at the University of Geneva since 2007.

Levrat participates in numerous research projects, financed by European and Swiss funds. He is a member of the Board of the European PhD School and Joint doctorate programme on Globalisation, Europe and Multilateralism. He is also co-director of the Swiss PhD school on the Foundation of European Law (through a consortium of six Swiss Universities). He also regularly provides expertise for European institutions and regional governments across Europe.

Professor Levrat is the Editor of two scientific collections (one on interdisciplinary European studies, and one in European Law), and the author of a dozen books. His research and publications are mostly concerned with federalism, European integration and the structure of European legal orders, minority rights, the role of local and regional governments in international relations, cross-border cooperation, and the impact of globalization on democratic institutions.

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Information is not yet available.

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This lecture examines the applicability of Edward Said’s theories to Russia about “Orientalism”
as a hegemonic device. The focus will be a painter and a composer whose works were created in
the late nineteenth century, at a time of tsarist conquest in Central Asia. After a brief survey of
how Russian Orientalism fits into the broader framework of Said’s ideas about culture and
colonialism, I will examine the war painter Vasilli Vereshchagin’s “Turkestan Series,” a group
of canvases executed in the early 1870’s, shortly after the artist participated in the campaign
against Samarkand. I will contrast Vareshchagin’s portrayal of tsarist small wars against the
Islamic khanates with Aleksandr Borodin’s opera Prince Igor. While based on a thirteenthcentury
medieval epic about an unsuccessful campaign against steppe nomads, the opera can also
be read as a metaphor for the tsarist march into Turkestan. The lecture will be accompanied by
slides as well as musical clips.

David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye is Professor of Russian history at Brock
University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. His research interests focus on
18th- and 19th-century Russian cultural, intellectual, diplomatic and military
history. Schimmelpenninck is the author of, among other, Toward the Rising Sun:
Russian Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan (DeKalb, IL: Northern
Illinois University Press, 2001) and Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind
from Peter the Great to the Emigration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
He is currently writing a book about tsarist expansion into Central Asia.
After a childhood in the Netherlands, Schimmelpenninck was educated at the
University of Toronto Schools and at Yale College. He spent ten years as an
investment banker in Toronto and the City of London before returning to Yale,
where he completed a doctorate in history in 1997. He has been awarded
fellowships by Harvard University’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, the
National Humanities Center, SSHRC and a Brock University Chancellor’s Chair
for Research Excellence.

Description

As a result of the recent bicentenary of the Duchy of Warsaw (1807-1815), a wave of publications have appeared discussing the significance of this short-lived, Napoleonic state that interrupted Poland’s domination by its neighbours. The lecture focuses on the most recent monograph on the duchy, the first scholarly synthesis on the duchy’s history in fifty years.

Description

Summary:
Facing one of the most important instances of slavery outside the Americas, early modern Ukrainian political actors used the language of redemption from slavery to gain moral capital in balancing the competing Eastern European empires and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Liberation was a central concern due to the high numbers of people captured by nomads and sold on the slave market, second only to sub-Saharan Africa. With Exodus and Moses as template, Ukrainians went from adaptation to Commonwealth institutional environments to exit and, finally, establishing the Hetmanate. Owing to some degree to their first-hand experiences of Ottoman slavery, which was far from the simplified image of plantation chattel slavery, many Ukrainians had a relation to liberty that depended on the context; in its Polish variant they at times cherished it, while others unfavorably compared it to the religious tolerance and even to slavery in the Ottoman empire.

Description

Katalin Kádár Lynn is a senior researcher at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and an independent scholar based in Budapest and California. Her principal area of research is WWII and the Cold War with an emphasis on Central and East European exile leaders, their organizations and activities.

She earned a PhD from ELTE BTK in 20th Century Hungarian history and a Masters in Liberal Arts from Washington University in St. Louis, MO.

She is the biographer of the Hungarian political figure Tibor Eckhardt, “Tibor Eckhardt: His American Years 1941-1972” published in the US ( East European Monographs) and in Hungary (L’Harmattan Press). She edited and published Eckhardt’s memoir “Tibor Eckhardt: In his own words” in English and in Hungarian and is working on the final edits of his 1941-1945 wartime reminiscences, which will be published in spring of 2012. Her most recent book in collaboration with Hungarian historians Károly Szerencsés and Péter Strausz is titled “Through an American Lens, Hungary 1938: Photographs by Margaret Bourke-White” ( English edition: East European Monographs 2010 – Hungarian edition, L’Harmattan Press 2009).

She is the editor of an upcoming compendium of essays on the history of the National Committee for a Free Europe, which will include her essays on history of the Hungarian National Council and the NCFE as well as contributions from scholars worldwide . She is also currently working on an expanded biography of Tibor Eckhardt which will encompass his Hungarian years and his wartime and Cold War intelligence activities. The expected date of publication of both books is late 2012, early 2013.

In March of 2011, she was awarded the Gold Cross of Merit ( Arany Érdemkereszt) of the Hungarian Republic by President Páll Schmitt.

Description

This talk draws from Professor El-Tayeb’s second single-authored book, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Duke University Press, 2011). The translocal strategies of resistance to the Europe-wide forms of racialization originates (in) a queer of color identity and activism shaped by transnational movements — central among them U.S. Women of Color Feminism and Hip Hop – while being rooted in particular geo-historical configurations of race, religion, colonialism, sexuality, nation and “Europeanness.” Professor El-Tayeb’s will present the book’s larger framework, then explore the spatiotemporal queering of communities of color through a neoliberal restructuring of the city, in which the symbolic inclusion of the white LGBT community is dependent on the exclusion of people of color and on the erasure of queer of color positionality.

Judith Halberstam described European Others as “a ground-breaking study, a theoretical adventure, and a major contribution to the literature on European racisms, queer diaspora, immigration, queer subcultures, and queer of color critique. No other scholar... has been able to weave together the strands of sexuality, gender, race, and resistance in such a daring and compelling way.”

Professor El-Tayeb is an Associate Professor of the Departments of Literature and Ethnic Studies and Associate Director for Critical Gender Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego. Her teaching and research interests include African and Comparative Diaspora Studies, Transnational Feminism, Migrant, Minority Cultures, and Muslim Communities in the West, Queer of Color Critique, Visual Cultural Studies, and Media Theory.

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Date: Wed Mar 28
Contact: ceresdocs@gmail.com
Description:
The monthly series of documentary films on Central and Eastern Europe continues with ‘The Woman with the Five Elephants’. Join us for the screening followed by a discussion.

THE WOMAN WITH FIVE ELEPHANTS
Vadim Jendreyko’s film introduces one of the most renowned translators of Russian literature. The “five elephants” are Dostoevsky’s major novels that Svetlana Geier translated into German over the span of many years. While sharing her fascinating life story from Soviet and later, Nazi occupied Ukraine to her emigration to Germany, Geier poetically reflects on language and the art of translation.

Description

Ukraine. When the Countdown Began, 2011 (Documentary by Serhy Bukovsky)

Made on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Ukraine’s independence by the celebrated filmmaker Serhy Bukovsky, this feature documentary revisits the reasons of the Soviet collapse in 1991. Politicians, like the Ukrainians Leonid Kravchuk, Levko Lukianenko, Belarusian Stanislau Shushkevich, Russian Gennadii Burbulis, Americans Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, as well as Ukrainian public intellectuals, like Myroslav Popovych, Yaroslav Hrytsak, Oksana Zabuzhko, Hluzman, et al., each offere their analyses of the events leading up to Ukraine’s independence. Canadian premier

The film will be introduced by Yuri Shevchuk, lecturer of Ukrainian language and culture and director of the Ukrainian Film Club at Columbia University, New York. Discussion will follow the film screening.

Description

Structure:

General Introduction and Welcome

Josef Cermak: On the importance of Skilling and Skvorecky and the “Canadian connection” to communist Czechoslovakia (10-15 minutes)

Sam Solecki: On his books on/with Josef Skvorecky and Skvorecky’s many contributions; Professor Solecki will structure his comments around a series of humorous anecdotes that illustrate Skvorecky’s views of life, art, nationalism, and politics (15-20 minutes)

Franklyn Griffiths: On the challenge of Skilling and Griffiths to the “monolithic” and totalitarian model to studying communism in political science from the 1960s onward (10 minutes)

Barbara Falk: On the legacies of Skilling’s work on samizdat and dissent in Czechoslovakia for studying the politics and history of the region and for how we study movements of resistance in authoritarian regimes today (10 minutes)

Vilem Precan: On the importance of Skilling and Skvorecky’s work and activism inside Czechoslovakia. Precan will also announce a number of upcoming events, for example the May 27-29 conference honoring Skilling’s life and work in Prague, as well as a major exhibition (10 minutes)

David Skilling: Will present a power point slide show with scanned photographs that visually illustrate the lives and legacies of both men (10 minutes)

Description

The Dream, 1964 (Feature film by Volodymyr Denysenko)

A biopic of the Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko, made on the occasion of his 150th anniversary. It features the first part of Shevchenko’s life leading up to the writing of his rebellious poem “The Dream”. Restored and digitally re-mastered in 2011 the film features the first appearance on the silver screen of the iconic Ukrainian actor Ivan Mykolaichuk (as Taras Shevchenko).

The film will be introduced by Yuri Shevchuk, lecturer of Ukrainian language and culture and director of the Ukrainian Film Club at Columbia University, New York. Discussion will follow the film screening.

Description

Information is not yet available.

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The Hungarian government has recently added a new dimension to their work with the diaspora: granting citizenship to those of Hungarian origin wherever they live in the world. Over 1,500,000 citizens of North America have declared themselves of Hungarian origin. What is the aim of this policy and what are its ramifications?

Description

The use of comparative reasoning in judicial decision-making has stirred considerable academic debate over the last decade, in particular in the U. S. There, the debate on the use of “foreign law” in especially the Supreme Court has been by far more voluminous than the use itself. By contrast, in European national supreme courts (the UK, France, Germany, and the Czech Republic taken as samples), the trend is quite the reverse: the foreign influence is considerable with limited or no debate on it. The fact that for instance the French Conseil d´Etat copies something from the UK Supreme Court or that the Czech Constitutional Court copied entire areas of case law from the German Bundesverfassungsgericht stirs no attention whatsoever. The aim of the lecture is twofold: firstly, to look at the facts, i.e. A quantitative view at the practice of the use of non-mandatory foreign authority in the reasoning of European supreme jurisdictions. Secondly, to explain these facts against the historical and social background of the evolution of legal theory and practice in (especially Continental) Europe of the last century: why is no one bothered by a practice which is the subject of very heated debates elsewhere?

Michal Bobek [Ph.D. European University Institute, 2011] is an Anglo-German Fellow in the Institute of European and Comparative Law, University of Oxford Faculty of Law, where he teaches European Union law. He is also member of St Edmund Hall. He has qualified as a judge in the Czech Republic. He worked for four years as legal assistant to the Chief Justice and served also as the head of the Research and Documentation Department at the Supreme Administrative Court of the Czech Republic, advising judges on European Union law, comparative law and human rights issues. He co-founded and presided the Czech Society for European and Comparative Law (Czech national association of International Federation of European Law – FIDE). He is a member of the Editorial Board of Soudní rozhledy (C.H. Beck), Právní rozhledy (C.H. Beck); of the Scientific Board of the Revista Română de Drept European; and former editor in-chief of the Common Law Review, Prague. His areas of interest include various aspects of European Union law, European human rights law, comparative public law and legal theory. He is the author, co-author or editor of nine books, two academic commentaries and dozens of articles and case notes, published world-wide in Czech, English, French and German, with works translated also into Rumanian, Polish and Russian. He teaches EU law not just to students, but also judges, attorneys and legal practitioners. He is external lecturer at both, the Czech as well as Slovak Judicial Academy and also lecturing for a number of Czech public institutions, law firms, NGOs, but also for instance law officials in the Georgian Parliament and Government in Tbilisi in the framework of TACIS programme of the European Commission.

Description

European Union has had a quiet, but dramatic effect on forms of migration in Europe. Where once the dominant mode of migration was immigration and refugee migration from far flung ex-colonial lands, in the wake of closer union and (especially) EU enlargement to the East, migration in Europe has become increasing regional in nature. Based on recent research on forms of intra-EU migration, the presentation will offer an overview of the new map of migration in Europe, and focus in particular on the material and symbolic effects of intra-EU migration, both from Western member states, and new member states such as Poland and Romania. Despite other forms of security/closure involved in EU border politics, there are also interesting “concentric” effects of building the E U which have brought into the picture free movement/mobility from neighbours – i.e. the de facto “integration” of Turkish, Moroccan or post-Soviet migration into the new European migration system. Classic forms of immigration (and control) need to be seen in a fluid and variable continuum with other forms of mobility, cross-border movement, trade and tourism.

Adrian Favell is Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po, affiliated to the Centre d’Études Européennes. He is also Professor of European and International Studies at Aarhus University, was previously Professor of Sociology at UCLA, and has worked at the Universities of Sussex, Utrecht and Louvain-la-Neuve. He holds a PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the European University Institute, Florence (1995).

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Feminism takes its shape from the social and political context in which it arises. By comparing the US and German varieties of feminism, this talk highlights how the politics of race and class offer constraints and opportunities for feminist organizing that are distinctively different in these and other national contexts.

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Mykola Riabchuk is a well-known Ukrainian author and journalist. He is author of Die reale und die imaginierte Ukraine [The real and the imagined Ukraine] (Suhrkamp 2006). Read more about him at http://www.eurozine.com/authors/riabchuk.html.

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Information is not yet available.

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In this presentation, Nikolai Krementsov looks at Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous novellas “Fateful Eggs” and “The Heart of a Dog” as an expression of two “scientific” revolutions that unfolded alongside, and in close interaction with, the Bolshevik Revolution: the experimental revolution in biomedical sciences and the concurrent dramatic upsurge in their cultural authority manifested in the rapid development of a new literary genre, science fiction.

Description

Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Empire, Hungary is attempting to redefine its role in the European Union, its relationship to the Euro and its relationship with other EU members. This meeting will give the students and scholars involved in the Hungarian Program and related studies in CERES a chance to get up to date information from the Hungarian Ambassador, who joined the diplomatic core after a distinguished career as an academic.

Description

EUGENE HUSKEY is Professor of Political Science and Director of Russian Studies at Stetson University. His publications range across three areas: the Russian executive, Soviet and post-Soviet law, and politics of the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan. He is the author of almost four dozen academic articles and has written or edited four
books: Russian Lawyers and the Soviet State (Princeton, 1986); Executive Power and Soviet Politics (editor and contributor, Sharpe, 1992); Presidential Power in Russia (Sharpe, 1999); and Russian Bureaucracy and the State: Officialdom from Alexander III to Putin (co-editor and contributor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Professor Huskey is an associate editor of Russian Review and is a member of the editorial board of The Journal of Postcommunist and Transition Studies
(Glasgow) and Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization (Washington, DC).

THE INTERIM COUNTRY
Directed by Thomas Lahusen, Gulzat Egemberdieva, and André Loersch.
Narrated by Eugene Huskey. Digital HD 16:9 & archival footage; color & b/w; 50 minutes; Kyrgyz and Russian, English subtitles; Canada, Kyrgyzstan, Russia (Chemodan Films, 2011).
The film chronicles the ever-deepening chaos, into which Kyrgyzstan, a small, land-locked country in Central Asia, plunged after a popular revolt that led to the toppling of president Bakiyev and his clan in April 2010, culminating with large-scale inter-ethnic violence in June 2010.

For a synopsis and trailer:http://www.chemodanfilms.com/the-interim-country/

Description

18th century seems to be one of the most thoroughly studied periods of Russian history with hundreds of books written both by Russian and Western historians and thousands of historical documents published. But knowing all the major facts doesn’t necessarily mean that we understand them properly. While 18th century was crucial for Russian history its proper understanding is equally important for the interpretation of what happened with Russia in course of three centuries that followed. Meanwhile with some of the new research works that have appeared lately it has become evident that some of our basic perceptions about 18th century Russia (especially its social history) need to be revised.

Description

Professor Ruffer’s research centres on questions of citizenship and human rights with a particular focus on immigrant integration, refugees, and the process of international justice. Her article “Courts Across Borders: The Implications of Judicial Agency for Human Rights and Democracy” (co-authored with David Jacobson) was published in Human Rights Quarterly (February 2003), has since been reprinted in People Out of Place (Routledge, 2004) and Dialogues on Migration Policy (Lexington Books, 2006). Her current projects include a monograph, “Citizens,” that draws upon constitutional theory to offer a conceptual framework within which to understand immigrant controversies in the U.S. and Europe and research on the use of testimonies and the processes of international justice in addressing the consequences of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo through rule of law. She is the founder of the Center for Forced Migration Studies at the Buffet Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern (http://www.bcics.northwestern.edu/programs/migrationstudies) and the Director of the International Studies Program. Aside from her academic work, Professor Ruffer has worked as an immigration attorney representing political asylum claimants both as a solo-practitioner and as a pro-bono attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center. She teaches courses on citizenship, immigration and the Politics of International Human Rights and is a fellow at the Public Affairs Residential College.

Description

The Canadian Premiere of Mikhail Kalik’s Goodbye, Boys! (Mosfilm, 1964; in Russian with English subtitles) will offer a beautiful coming-of-age story of three friends in a small seaside town at the onset of World War II. Due to the controversial topics raised in the film—such as the Stalinist Soviet Union in the late 1930s and during World War II (including the Holocaust)—this film remained censored until the early 1990s. Olga Gershenson, a scholar of Soviet-Jewish film, will introduce the film and will lead a discussion after the screening.
Free Admission | Limited General Seating
This film is part of the three-day conference: Jewish Life and Death in the Soviet Union during World War II (http://cjs.utoronto.ca/jewishlifeanddeath)

Description

Featuring:
• The Annual Lecture of the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Chair in Holocaust Studies (Sunday, March 25, 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.):
• Ilya Altman
• (Founder and Co-Chairman, Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center, Moscow; Professor RGGU; and Yad Vashem Fellow)
• “The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Unknown Pages”
• Canadian premiere of Mikhail Kalik’s Goodbye Boys (1964, with English subtitles) on March 24, 7 p.m., Innis Town Hall, with introduction and commentary by Olga Gershenson .
• Presentations from Wendy Lower (Clark), Zvi Gitelman (University of Michigan), Karel Berkoff (NIOD Institute for War), Gennady Estraikh (New York University), Harriet Murav (Urbana), John Paul Himka (University of Alberta), Gennady Kostyrchenko (Moscow Institute of History at the Academy of Science), Oleg Budnitskii (National Research University Higher School of Economics), and many others. (Sunday, March 25, 1 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.; and Monday, March 26, 9:30 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.)
• A photo exhibit from the Blavatnik Institute (New York): Jewish Lives in the Great Patriotic War.
• Book Exhibit.
• Registration is not required. For further information, please contact Emily Spinggay (Centre for Jewish Studies ) or Michael Kasprzak (michal.kasprzak@utoronto.ca).

Description

Gennadii Kostyrchenko, the author of Out of the Red Shadows : Anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia (1995), has been working on this project since 1997. His denial of the dominant at the time theory about Stalin’s preparation of a mass deportation of Jews became a sensation in scholarly circles and spurred a long-lasting polemic in the field of Eastern European Jewish history. His talk will also discuss the convoluted history of the still-born project of the creation of a Jewish Soviet Republic in Crimea (1944).

Description

Since the foundation of the Turkish Republic, belonging to the Turkish nation and benefitting from its resources was argued to be reserved for secular citizens. Only those should be allowed to participate in its institutions, such as government jobs and universities. Women with headscarves were presented as outsiders to Turkey, for example, through statements that such women belong to the Islamic Republic of Iran or to Saudi Arabia, and should live there (see also Göle 2002). By excluding women with headscarves from the state sphere, denying them basic civil rights, such as education and employment in civil services, pro-seculars have attempted to unambiguously exclude them from belonging in Turkey.
Recently, shifting class boundaries have seen the rise of an Islamic elite who are impinging on spaces historically reserved for seculars. This new elite are adopting aspects of middle- and upper-class lifestyles. University education is now open to women with headscarves; moreover they are receiving university degrees as doctors, lawyers, and engineers, but are also keeping their religious practices. The rise of the Islamic elite has led many secular political actors and Turkish citizens to see religious people and their politics as a threat to the areas that were primarily perceived as belonging to them. In this context, the headscarf of religious women has become a symbol of threat for seculars and a symbol of political and socio-economic ascent for religious actors. Many had believed that the liberal democratic discourses of the current governing party, Ak Party, would bring a new political era in Turkish politics. Although the liberal democratic politics have enabled women with headscarves to attend universities, this political context is rapidly changing in Turkey, from liberal democratic narratives of the governing party to that of an authoritarian one. What will be the future of Turkish politics? What is the role of Europe in this changing political context, specially the role of Germany? What is the power of religious women, if any, in this political context?

Gökçe Yurdakul is Georg Simmel Professor of Diversity and Social Conflict at the Humboldt University, Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences. She studied Sociology at the Bogazici University and Gender & Women’s Studies at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey. She has her PhD from the University of Toronto, Department of Sociology where she received the Connaught Fellowship. Previously, she has taught courses on race, ethnicity, gender and immigration at the Trinity College Dublin and Brock University, St. Catharines, Canada. She was affiliated with the Free University, Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies as a post-doctoral fellow. She has published books and articles on immigrant integration, citizenship Islam in Europe and issues of Muslim women in Western Europe and North America. She has written articles for scholarly journals, such as Annual Review of Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and German Politics and Society. For further information, see http:// gokceyurdakul.net

Description

Sergei Zhuk will talk about his new research project on a cultural, intellectual and social history of the American studies (Amerikanistika) in Russia and Ukraine after Stalin. Using various Soviet – Russian and Ukrainian – studies of the U.S./Canadian history, culture and politics, archival documents, personal correspondence of such Soviet Americanists like Nikolai Bolkhovitinov and Arnold Shlepakov, and more than 100 interviews as its historical sources, Sergei Zhuk will analyze how Russian and Ukrainian scholars employed different ideas of the North American civilization as the elements for (de)construction of Soviet and post-Soviet modernity in both Russia and Ukraine during the period of late socialism. Combining the methods of symbolic anthropology, oral history and historical sociology, Zhuk will focus on how the notions of the “imaginary West/imaginary America” and Soviet practices of history writing interacted with the ideological orthodoxy and centralist infrastructure of the American studies in the USSR and contributed to the intellectual opposition of the Soviet peripheries (Ukraine) to the Soviet center (Moscow) during the perestroika.

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This talk explores the use of the terms “Ukrainian nation” and “Ruthenian nation” by Hetman Petro Doroshenko and his contemporaries. It demonstrates that the Ukrainian terminology was reserved for the territory under the authority of the hetman which traditionally included the palatinates of Kyiv, Bratslav, and Chernihiv. In fact, it argues that Hetman Doroshenko’s rule represented the apogee of a growing Ukrainian identity, the major component of which included a defined Ukrainian territory and concepts of a Ukrainian Fatherland and a Ukrainian nation. Yet this Ukrainian nation was still part and parcel of a larger Ruthenian nation. While the hetman and the Zaporozhian Cossack Host were the “possessors” of Ukraine, they also continued to play the role of protectors of the Ruthenian nation both in the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Hetman Doroshenko, moreover, actively attempted to unite Ruthenian-inhabited territories into a Ruthenian-Ukrainian state. Thus, the concept of a common Ruthenian nationhood encompassing Ukraine, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland, acted as a barrier for the emergence of the idea of a completely separate Ukrainian nation. The Ukrainian nomenclature was further diminished by the elimination of the Right-Bank Hetmanate (its chief proponent) and the utilization of an alternative “Little Russia” nomenclature within the surviving Left-Bank Hetmanate.

Description

Since the fall of Communism, Poland’s small Jewish communities have undergone a significant revival, a process occurring in tandem with non-Jewish Poles’ soul searching about their role in the Holocaust and the development of their interest in Jewish culture and Poland’s Jewish past. This interest is visible in the mushrooming of Festivals of Jewish culture throughout Poland, the renewed popularity ofklezmer music, the dramatic proliferation of Judaica bookstores and Jewish cuisine restaurants, the governmental sponsorship of “virtual shtetls,” the emergence of Jewish studies programs at multiple universities, the opening of new museums and memorials, and the public centrality of artists’ and intellectuals’ engagements with Poland’s Jewish past and Polish-Jewish relations more broadly. How can we make sense of this phenomenon? What does Poland’s Jewish renaissance teach us about the politics of memory and identity formation, and the relationship betweennational identity and religion in the global age? Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and interviews, Professor Zubrzycki studies various forms of Jewish-centered enterprises and practices, and analyzes the different meanings they hold for the Jewish and non-Jewish actors and institutions engaged in them. She shows how the revival of Jewish culture in Poland is part of broader process of redefinition of Polish national identity and the building of pluralism in contemporary Poland.

Geneviève Zubrzycki is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Polish Studies at the University of Michigan. She studies national identity and religion, collective memory and the politics of commemorations, and the role of symbols in national mythology in the Polish and Québécois contexts. Her book, The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (University of Chicago Press, 2006), received the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Book Award from the Sociology of Religion section, the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies’ Orbis Best Book Prize, and the Polish Studies Association’s Best Book Award. Her most recent article, “History and the National Sensorium: Making Sense of Polish Mythology,” won the ASA’s Clifford Geertz Award for Best Paper in the Sociology of Culture in 2011. More information on her research can be found at
http://web.me.com/gzu/Genevieve_Zubrzycki

Description

László J. Kulcsár is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Kansas State University’s Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work. His PhD in Development Sociology is from Cornell University (2005), and his field of expertise is social demography and regional development, with a particular emphasis on migration, urbanization and spatial inequalities. Prof. Kulcsár does research on population dynamics and social change in rural areas, focusing on two major trends: aging and the impact of natural resource use. Dr. Kulcsár also studies the social and demographic transformation of post-socialist Eastern Europe from a historical perspective. He teaches courses on social and spatial inequalities, population dynamics, aging, immigration and sociological methodology.

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Download program at http://www.utoronto.ca/ceres/

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This talk explores the participation and visibility of Jews and the Jewish genocide in the Soviet regime’s efforts to document war crimes and mete out justice in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi occupation. Using records from local Soviet Extraordinary State Commissions and trials of collaborators in Ukraine as well as autobiographical sources, this talk complicates the traditional narrative emphasizing the silence surrounding the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, epitomized by the erasure of Jewish victimhood in public discussions of the “peaceful Soviet citizens” murdered by the Nazis. By giving careful attention to the context in which these documents, never intended for public consumption in the USSR, were produced and the language used in them, this analysis highlights the more complex ways in which Soviet, national, and other identities pervaded local conceptions of the human tragedy wrought by the occupiers.

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This talk will consider the role the Soviet Union’s western borderlands annexed during World War II played in the evolution of Soviet politics of empire. Using the Baltic Republics and Western Ukraine as case studies, it will argue that Sovietization had a profound impact on these borderlands, integrating them into a larger Soviet polity. However, guerrilla warfare and Soviet policy making indirectly led to these regions becoming perceived as more Western and nationalist than other parts of the Soviet Union. The Baltic Republics and Western Ukraine differed in their engagement with the Western capitalist world. Their perceptions of what it meant to
belong to a nation reflected different experiences of World War II.
Consequently, this Soviet West was far from uniform, though it contributed to perceptions that the Soviet Union was an empire rather than a family of nations by the end of the 1980s.

Description

History is often political. As Martin Conway noted, the struggle for memory is a mechanism by which political forces compete for the present and the future. (Conway, 2004) History remains an important battleground in today’s globalized world and certainly in the Post Communist space. This symposium presents new perspectives on the debates by bringing together an international, inter-disciplinary panel. The focus will be on World War II and Ukraine. However, rather than trying to determine who were the ‘heroes’ and who were the ‘villains,’ the speakers will explore the international context of the history and memory of millions of ordinary Ukrainians uprooted during the course of the war. They will discuss how experiences were politicized during the Cold War, how debates are changing after the collapse of communism, and the importance of mass media in this process.

Participants:

Marta Dyczok, Dphil, Oxford, Associate Professor, Departments of Political Science and History, University of Western Ontario, Fellow, CERES, Munk School of Global Affairs Adjunct Professor, National University of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, Harvard Shklar Fellow 2011. She will speak about her new research project which is the starting point: how competing media representations of Ukrainians displaced during World War II shape collective memory, and how this story challenges dominant narratives. The interdisciplinary project builds on her two previous studies: The Grand Alliance and Ukrainian Refugees (2000) and Media, Democracy and Freedom (2009). During her summer 2011 research trip to Ukraine she conducted numerous interviews, and brought together a research team. Two of these research collaborators will be invited to participate in the symposium, since each brings a unique point of view to the issues.

Vladyslav Hrynevych, Doktor Istorychnykh Nauk, Senior Research Associate, Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Associate Professor, National University of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, formerly of the Ukrainian Institute for National Memory. One of Ukraine’s top scholars of memory politics, he contextualizes the story of displaced people in the larger debates surrounding World War II and collective memory. In addition to conducting research, publishing scholarly works, including Social and Political Moods and Morality of the population in Ukraine during the Second World War (2007), speaking at international conferences on the politics of memory in Ukraine, Hrynevych regularly comments on the subject in Ukrainian and international media outlets.

Journalist Andriy Kulykov, brings a different kind of perspective. BBC trained in England, he is one of Ukraine’s top journalists. Host of a live, weekly TV political talk show, Svoboda Slova z Andriem Kulykovom: http://svoboda.ictv.ua/, which was named political talk show of the year in June 2011, he also lectures at various Ukrainian universities and supervises graduate students. A graduate of Kyiv University’s Faculty of International Relations and Law, during the Soviet era worked as deputy editor of News From Ukraine, a publication aimed at Ukrainians living abroad. Thus he brings the viewpoint of a media practitioner, as well as a non-academic angle on how Ukrainians in the country and beyond its borders view each other, how media represents this, and how this has changed over time.

Description

Description
The crises of the year 2011 – the Euro-crisis and the political crisis in Northern Africa – had a deep political and economic impact on the European Union and Germany as its largest economy and one of its key members. The performance of the European Union and – even more importantly – the EU member states in handling those crises points to a broader and persistent crisis of leadership in the EU.
The international and interdisciplinary conference intends to focus on the consequences of the aforementioned crises for Europe and Germany one year after the onset of the “Arab Spring” and the intensified attempts to contain the Euro crisis.

Program

Opening Talk: “Germany and Europe after an ‘annus horribilis’”
Wolfram Hilz

Keynote Speech: “Germany’s role in Europe’s crises”
Kurt Biedenkopf, ret. PM of Saxony, Dresden

Panel one, “The never-ending Euro-crisis and its economic and political consequences”:
Alena Kimakova, Louis Pauly, Kurt Hübner,

Panel two, “‘Arabellion’ as Europe’s ‘writing on the wall’: Consequences for Europe’s “mission” in the Arab world:
Sharon Pardo, Costanza Musu, Ramin Jahanbegloo

Panel three, “Mission creep? New start for Europe’s migration policy”:
Phil Triadaphilopoulos, Elke Winter, Willem Maas

Panel four: “The West adrift? How North Americans and Europeans need to adjust their transatlantic policies after the crises
Jean-Yves Haine, Beate Neuss, Benjamin Zyla