"A Translator's Surprises"
Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky, Translators
Date and Time: Wednesday, April 1 at 4:00 P.M.
Location: 325 Pyle Center, 702 Langdon Street
Sponsors: CREECA and the Center for the Humanities
About the lecture: Richard Pevear speaks on his experiences in translation.
About the speakers: Richard Pevear is an American-born poet and translator, best known for his translations in collaboration with his Russian-born wife, Larissa Volokhonsky. Together they have translated literary works, principally from Russian but also from French, Italian, and Greek. Pevear, who was named Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris in 2007 where he teaches courses in Russian literature and translation, has worked with his Volokhonsky on several translations that have garnered them two PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prizes for Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. They have also translated works by Gogol, Bulgakov, and Chekhov, and have recently discussed the art of translation in a three-part interview for Ideas, the long-running Canadian Broadcasting Company radio documentary series.
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Silk Road Concert
Date and Time: Thursday, April 2 at 7:30 P.M.
Location: Great Hall of the Memorial Union, 800 Langdon Street
Free and open to the public!
Sponsors: CREECA, Central Asian Student Association
About the event: Celebrate Nawruz with a free concert! Shahyar Daneshgar on vocals and percussion. Novruz
Mamedov on vocals, saz and percussion. Rashad Mamedov on keyboard and accordion. Arif Bagirov on tar and guitar.
For more information about the Silk Road ensemble, check out their website at:
http://www.silkroadensemble.com/about.php.
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"Being 'Black' in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia: Identity, Adaptation, and Racism"
Jeff Sahadeo, Assistant Professor of Political Science and European and Russian Studies, Carleton University
Date and Time: Thursday, April 9 at 4:00 P.M.
Location: 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive
Sponsors: CREECA
About the lecture: Following the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of citizens from Asian regions of the Soviet Union assumed residence in the "two capitals" of Leningrad and Moscow. They joined larger waves of migration from developing to developed worlds, seeking greater opportunity even as their own regions enjoyed benefits of Soviet social spending. In their new environment, Soviet Asian migrants wrestled with issues of identity and adaptation to a new cosmopolitan, Slavic society. Despite the official slogan of "friendship of peoples," some faced forms of racism. Oral histories nonetheless show a great deal of nostalgia for the Soviet era, as racism and xenophobia in contemporary Russia mount. Soviet-era migrants provided the networks for millions of Georgians, Kyrgyz and others who now fund their communities through remittances even as they face extortion and racial violence on a daily basis.
About the speaker: Jeff Sahadeo is an associate professor at the Institute of European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at Carleton University. He is the author of Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent 1865-1923 and the co-editor of Everyday Life in Central Asia: Past and Present, both published by Indiana University Press in 2007. He has contributed articles to Central Asian Survey, Slavic Review, and Canadian Slavonic Papers on issues of colonial contact, migration, and diaspora. This paper is part of a book-length study on migration to Soviet Leningrad and Moscow. Professor Sahadeo graduated with a Ph. D. in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2000.
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"The Paradox of Rural Community Development in the Transition Economy of Ukraine"
Olenda Borodina & Oleksandra Borodina
Date and Time: Wednesday, April 15 at 12:00 P.M.
Location: Frederick Buttel Conference Room, 354 Agricultural Hall, 1450 Linden Drive
Sponsors: Department of Rural Sociology
About the lecture: TBA
About the speaker: TBA
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"Fica, Trabi and Dyana: Little Cars that Make Us Laugh and Cry"
Marko Zivkovic, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Alberta
Date and Time: Thursday, April 16 at 4:00 P.M.
Location: 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive
Sponsors: CREECA
About the lecture: Following Daphne Berdahl's lead in analyzing the East German Trabi, the speaker takes the car that holds a comparable place in the ex-Yugoslav imaginaries - the popular "Fica" (750 ccm Yugoslav version of Fiat 600D) as a major vehicle for telling stories of jury-rigging, as a commentary on the makeshift, crooked, improvised, shoddy, unreliable, irrational, and messy nature of the social world. The speaker will also situate Fica in the Yugoslav car system, sketch its role as a "peg" in the social frameworks of memory, and as a link in the economies of favor. Painstaking restoration of old Ficas to their pristine "factory condition" will be examined as a metaphorical return to an imaginary pristine, un-rigged state predating the war and chaos of the 1990s. The animating concern of the lecture will be to account for the power little cars can have to make us cry. A hunch will be explored that this power comes from a critical metaphoric density certain vehicles
can acquire in the course of their social life.
About the speaker: Marko Zivkovic, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, earned his B.A. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Belgrade and his Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago. His research interests include the symbolic and performative dimensions of politics, the ethnography of socialism and post-socialism, and the anthropology of art. In addition to teaching courses on the Balkans and East/Central Europe, Professor Zivkovic has published in English, Spanish, and Serbo-Croatian on topics including Serbian cultural identity, symbolic geography and dreams, and ethno-geography in the Balkans.
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Russian Folk Orchestra: Annual Spring Concert
Date: Sunday, April 19
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: Mills Hall, Mosse Humanities Building, 455 N. Park St.
About the concert: Russian and East-European folk music performed on authentic Russian instruments.
Lennart Bäckström, Baritone soloist.
Tickets
General Admission: $15
Students and Senior Citizens: $10
Advance Ticket Sales
Memorial Union Box Office (800 Langdon Street)
Vilas Hall Box Office (821 University Avenue)
Phone: 608-265-2787
Tickets can be purchased online through Choice Ticketing. Tickets are also available at the door prior to the concert.
For more information, please visit www.russorch.wisc.edu, or e-mail Victor Gorodinsky at musicdir@russorch.wisc.edu.
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"Conservation of Indigenous Cultures in Siberia through the Restoration of Reindeer Husbandry"
Leonid Baskin, Chief Scientist of the Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution
Russian Academy of Science (Moscow, Russia)
Date and Time: Wednesday, April 22 at 3:00 P.M.
Location: Room 104, Russell Labs, 1630 Linden Drive
Sponsors: Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, Department of Anthropology, CREECA
For more information: Please contact Volker Radeloff, radeloff@wisc.edu
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"The Legal Case for Russia's Intervention in Georgia"
Nicolai N. Petro, Professor of Politics, University of Rhode Island
Date and Time: Thursday, April 23 at 4:00 P.M.
Location: 336 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive
Sponsors: CREECA
About the lecture: Russia's "peace enforcement" operation in Georgia in August 2008 has been widely condemned in the West. Despite such criticism, however, the Russian elite and populace remain united in their view that Russian intervention was both morally and legally justified. Russia's persistent appeal to international law throughout this crisis highlights its growing importance in Russian foreign policy thinking. In the future, Russia will seek to both uphold the basic tenets current of international law, but also to make it more broadly representative, in terms of its geography and "civilizational content." While this poses a challenge to the supremacy of Western standards of international law, it is not a rejection of legality, and so long as Russia feels that it has a say in framing and applying these standards, it will continue to support them in international fora.
About the speaker: Nicolai N. Petro, Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island, received his B.A. summa cum laude in history, M.A. in public administration, and Ph.D. in foreign affairs, all from the University of Virginia. He has also held prestigious teaching appointments at the University of Virginia, University of Pennsylvania, and the Monterey Institute of International Studies where he became the founding director of the Center for Contemporary Russian Studies (now the Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies). In addition to his numerous awards and titles, including a Senior Fulbright Lectureship to Russia in 1996-1997 and an honorary doctorate from Novgorod State University for “great merits in the development of the University and an outstanding contribution to the Science, Culture and Education of the Land of Novgorod,” Professor Petro has published widely on post-communist Russian politics. His books include Crafting Democracy: How Novgorod Has Coped with Rapid Social Change (Cornell University Press, 2004), The Rebirth of Russian Democracy: An Interpretation of Political Culture (Harvard University Press, 1995) and Russian Foreign Policy: From Empire to Nation-State, which he co-authored with Professor Alvin Z. Rubinstein (Longman, 1997).
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"Transforming Bureaucracy: Conditional Norms and the International Standardization of
Statistics in Russia"
Yoshiko Herrera, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Date and Time: Friday, April 24 at 12:15-1:30 P.M.
Location: 8108 Social Sciences Building, 1180 Observatory Drive
Sponsors: The Sociology of Economic Change and Development brownbag
About the lecture: For more information, please contact Mara Loveman at mloveman@ssc.wisc.edu.
About the speaker: The speaker's website is available here: https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/yherrera/web
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"Freedom of Conscience in Russian Philosophical Liberalism: The Controversy over Vladimir Solov'ev"
Randall Poole, Associate Professor of History, College of St. Scholastica
Date and Time: Thursday, April 30 at 4:00 P.M.
Location: 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive
Sponsors:
About the lecture: Freedom of conscience was a core value of Russian liberalism. In 1855 Boris Chicherin called it “the first and most sacred right of a citizen.” By the turn of the century, it was a basic demand of the Russian Liberation Movement that would culminate in the Revolution of 1905. This paper will examine the controversial role that Vladimir Solov'ëv, Russia’s greatest religious philosopher, had in centralizing freedom of conscience in Russian liberal thought. For Solov'ëv, freedom of conscience was nothing other than the ground of human dignity and the condition of human self-realization, which for him meant the achievement of “Godmanhood.” But Solov'ëv combined defense of freedom of conscience with advocacy of “free theocracy,” his vision of the social ideal. This combination confounded fellow Russian idealist philosophers such as Chicherin and Evgenii Trubetskoi. The result was a lively controversy, involving some of Russia’s greatest philosophers, over fundamental issues of liberal theory and political theology.
About the speaker: Randall A. Poole is Associate Professor of History at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota, and a CREECA affiliate member. He has held research fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New York University, Stanford University, Columbia University, and elsewhere. He has written numerous essays in Russian intellectual history and philosophy, translated and edited Problems of Idealism: Essays in Russian Social Philosophy (Yale University Press, 2003), and co-edited (with G. M. Hamburg) A History of Russian Philosophy, 1830-1930 (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press).
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