KEYNOTE | SEMINAR 1 | SEMINAR 2 | SEMINAR 3 | SEMINAR 4 | SEMINAR 5
| SEMINAR 6
Over the fall of 2020, we will convene six zoom seminars to workshop contributions to the Red Migrations volume. The preliminary schedule is to hold these meetings between 12 and 2 PM EST (9-11 AM PT, 8-10 PM Moscow Time) on the following Fridays.
September 11, 2020, 12:00 PM Eastern Time (U.S.) via Zoom
Red Migrations Keynote by Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary University of London): “Resistance to Theory”
Generously hosted by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University
To receive the Zoom link and attend, please RSVP here.
“The resistance to theory” is a title of a 1982 essay by Paul de Man (later included in his eponymous book). But in this talk it serves as no more than a homophonic fillip to begin to think about exile, mobility, and the complex, often contrasting ways, in which they work to facilitate the generation, inscription, or forsaking of theory.
I begin with some more general reflections on exile and mobility, focusing in the second part of the lecture on their historically attested capacity to generate theoretically valid discourses (since the overarching title of the project is “Red Migrations: Marxism and Transnational Mobility after 1917”, I select a couple of cases from the time after World War I). In the final part, I consider the phenomena of globalisation and mass migration today and seek to comprehend whether and how they might be linked to the current wave of resistance to theory.
Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He has held visiting appointments at universities in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. He is the author of five monographs, including The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford UP, 2019). Tihanov’s research interests range from Russian, German, and Central-European intellectual history to world literature, cultural theory, cosmopolitanism, and exile. He is elected member of Academia Europaea, past president of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory, and member of the Executive Board of the Institute for World Literature (IWL) at Harvard University; he is also honorary scientific advisor to the Institute of Foreign Literatures, CASS (Beijing). He is currently writing Cosmopolitanism: A Very Short Introduction, commissioned by Oxford UP.
Seminar 1 | September 25, 2020, 12:00 PM Eastern Time (U.S.) via Zoom
Roman Utkin (Wesleyan University), “Guides to Berlin: Exiles, Émigrés, and the Left”
Discussant: Elena Zemskova
Edward Tyerman (UC Berkeley), “Revolutionary Violence with Chinese Characteristics: Chinese Migrants in Early Soviet Literature”
Discussant: Gregory Afinogenov
Katerina Clark (Yale University), “Ralph Fox in Moscow and Central Eurasia”
Discussant: Philip Gleissner
To receive the Zoom link and attend, please RSVP here. Panelists can access the papers here (password protected).
To access the Zoom meeting, click here.
Seminar 2 | October 9, 2020, 12:00 PM Eastern Time (U.S.) via Zoom
Helen Fehervary (The Ohio State University), “László Radványi alias Johann-Lorenz Schmidt (1900-1978): The Transnational Journeys and Multiple Lives of a Hungarian Intellectual and Scholar“
Discussant: Irina Denischenko
Kimberley St. Julian-Varnon (University of Pennsylvania), “Blackness in the Red Land: African Americans and Identity in the ‘colorless’ Soviet Union”
Discussant: Elena Ostrovskaya
Bradley Gorski (Georgetown), “‘Dirt, Syphilis, and the Frontiers of the Revolution’: Langston Hughes on the Borders of Disgust”
Discussant: Michael Kunichika
To access the Zoom meeting, click here.
Seminar 3 | October 23, 2020, 12:00 PM Eastern Time (U.S.) via Zoom
Tatsiana Shchurko (The Ohio State University), “‘Ephemeral’ solidarities and transnational feminist genealogies: re-imagining Hermina Dumont Huiswoud’s trip to the Soviet Union, 1930-33”
Discussant: Katherine Reischl
Elena Zemskova (Higher School of Economics, Moscow), “Edward Falkowski, American Journalist in 1930s Moscow”
Discussant: Katerina Clark
Philip Gleissner (The Ohio State University), “Inconvenient Reunification: Encounters of German Leftists with the 1960s Soviet Union”
Discussant: Roman Utkin
To access the Zoom meeting, click here.
Seminar 4 | November 13, 2020, 12:00 PM Eastern Time (U.S.) via Zoom
Anna Arustamova (Perm State University), “The ‘Father Of Russian Futurism’ In America: David Burliuk’s Literary Strategy in The Russian Voice”
Discussant: Rossen Djagalov
Michael Kunichika (Amherst College), “Preservation vs. Innovation in “Red” Travelogues of the 1920s”
Discussant: Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon
Milla Fedorova (Georgetown University), That Terrible Town’ That ‘Lives without Bragging’: Chicago City Space in Early Soviet Travelogues
Discussant: Serguei Oushakine
To access the Zoom meeting, click here.
Seminar 5 | December 4, 2020, 12:00 PM Eastern Time (U.S.) via Zoom
MEETING CANCELED.
Seminar 6 | December 14, 2020, 12:00 PM Eastern Time (U.S.) via Zoom
Elizabeth H. Stern (Heidelberg, Germany), “Staging Revolution in the German Democratic Republic”
Discussant: Helena Goscilo
Irina Denischenko (Georgetown University), “Transnational Theory of the Avant-garde: János Mácza, Artistic Praxis, and Marxist Sociology”
Discussant: Helen Fehervary
Serguei Oushakine (Princeton University), “Circus, Theater, and Festival: On Spheres and Circles of Soviet Cosmopolitanism”
Discussant: Edward Tyerman
To access the Zoom webinar, click here.