Thursday, October 26th, 2017 Beau Monde on Empire's Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine

Description

During her talk, 2012-2013 Jacyk Postdoctoral Fellow Professor Mayhill Fowler will present her recently published book. In Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge, Mayhill C. Fowler tells the story of the rise and fall of a group of men who created culture both Soviet and Ukrainian. This collective biography showcases new aspects of the politics of cultural production in the Soviet Union by focusing on theater and on the multi-ethnic borderlands. Unlike their contemporaries in Moscow or Leningrad, these artists from the regions have been all but forgotten despite the quality of their art. Beau Monde restores the periphery to the center of Soviet culture. Sources in Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and Yiddish highlight the important multi-ethnic context and the challenges inherent in constructing Ukrainian culture in a place of Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and Jews. Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge traces the growing overlap between the arts and the state in the early Soviet years, and explains the intertwining of politics and culture in the region today. The book has been published with University of Toronto Press.

Dr. Mayhill C. Fowler (Ph.D., Princeton) is assistant professor of history at Stetson University, where she also directs the program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. She teaches and researches the cultural history of Russia and Eastern Europe, with a focus on Ukraine, and is interested in how social and political structures shape entertainment, representation, and live performance. She has published widely on culture in Ukraine. Her first book– Beau Monde at Empire’s Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine (Toronto, 2017)—tells the story of how a very rich cultural center became a cultural periphery through a collective biography of young artists and officials in the 1920s and 1930s. Her second project investigates how we entertain soldiers, through the lens of the former Red Army Theater in Lviv. She also thinks about the Soviet actress, Yiddish theater, and 19th century itinerant theater clans. She was the Petro Jacyk Postdoctoral Fellow at Toronto in 2012-2013, held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute, and taught cultural history at the Catholic University in Lviv.