February 2008 |
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7 "Energy from the Caspian: A New Great Game for Russia, Central Asia, and the World" |
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14 "Russian Military Photography & Central Asian Album-Mania in the 19th-century" |
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21 “Kazakh Chinggisids and their Lands under Russian Rule in the 19th Century” Virginia Martin |
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28 Legal Connections: Litigation, Supervision, and Sovereignty in Late Imperial Russia |
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Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Location: 7:00 PM, Morphy Hall, Mosse Humanities Building, 455 N. Park St
Sponsors: CREECA
About the group: Zolotoj Plyos, the colorful and popular Russian ensemble will present a concert of folk songs and instrumental music on February 5 at 7pm in Morphy Hall on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This trio consists of world-famous professional Russian folk musicians who graduated from the Higher Music School in Saratov, a city located on the banks of the Volga River in Russia. The group has traveled extensively throughout Russia collecting and preserving the tradition of Russian folk music. Formed in 1994, Zolotoj Plyos performs traditional Russian folk songs, accompanied by a large variety of authentic folk instruments, including the treshchetka, balalaika, garmoshka and lozhki. Their performances are lively and entertaining for listeners of all ages. The group has won numerous prizes in various folk music festivals in Russia, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and Germany, and has even performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. This evening concert is intended for students, faculty, and community members of all ages.
"Energy from the Caspian: A New Great Game for Russia, Central Asia, and the World"
Thursday, February 7, 2008
David E. Knuti, Foreign Commercial Service Officer
Location: 4:00 PM, 206 Ingraham, 1155 Observatory Drive
Sponsors: CREECA
About the lecture: The Caspian region is reemerging as major source of world energy, but its resources are difficult to produce and separated from markets by long distances and complex geopolitical obstacles. While small in comparison to the Middle East, Caspian production could provide the world with a crucial increment of resources to meet its relentlessly growing demand. If successfully developed and transported, this production could provide an additional 3.0 million barrels/day (bbl/da) of oil in the next 15 years, which could meet a major share of the world’s projected increased demand of 10 million bbl/da. If this promise is met, the emerging states of Central Asia could have a good chance for stability and a modicum of prosperity. This talk will discuss the challenges of the governments and international companies in developing difficult deposits and moving products thousands of miles to consumers. It will also explore the complex geopolitical issues of transportation th rough the Black Sea-Turkish corridor, and alternative transit routes and customers to the south and east in Iran, India and China. Russia and the U.S. have special commercial, geopolitical, and energy-security interests in Caspian energy development, which are key factors in the total picture.
About the speaker: David Knuti has been an observer of Russia, the former Soviet Union and international energy issues for over twenty five years in various professional capacities. He is especially knowledgeable on Russian energy issues and the development of the oil and gas production of the Caspian region. As a CIA analyst, he worked in the 1990s on the emergence of Caspian energy developments from a low priority backwater of Soviet industry to a key resource for U.S. energy security. He was a key analyst of the major production developments in Baku, Azerbaijan and north Caspian Kazakhstan zones as well as the epic diplomatic efforts to advance the Caspian Pipeline Consortium and Baku-Ceyhan oil pipelines from the region. Moving to the Commerce Department in 1996, he supported U.S. diplomatic efforts to positively influence Caspian and Russian energy development as part of U.S. negotiating teams traveling frequently to Turkey and the Caspian region to meet with heads of governme nt and company execu tives. His final professional service was in the U.S. Foreign Commercial Service for three-year stints in Moscow and Budapest where he worked with foreign governments to facilitate energy policy reform and U.S. company investments. Since he retiring in 2005, Mr. Knuti has maintained his expertise on these issues and given lectures on the UW campus and in the community. He holds a Master’s degree in Soviet and Eastern European Studies from the University of Kansas and is a graduate of the Defense Language Institute Russian course.
"Russian Military Photography & Central Asian Album-Mania in the 19th-century"
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Heather S. Sonntag, Doctoral Candidate, Languages and Cultures of Asia, UW-Madison
Location: 4:00 PM, 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive
About the lecture: Heather S. Sonntag, PhD Candidate in the Department of Languages & Cultures of Asia, will discuss research on her doctoral thesis about the use of photography to map Russian conquest in Central Asia. Her talk will focus on the earliest representations of colonial Central Asia and their material history, extending from what she identifies as album-mania, a global phenomenon of photographic album production and proliferation in the mid-to-late 19th century. She will elaborate how this phenomenon became a Russified form inextricably linked to the Russian military, which both embedded photographers in the field and served as elite patrons and producers of a vast photographic archive of empire. Her talk will be richly illustrated from her data collection gathered over the last two years of archival fieldwork.
About the speaker: Heather S. Sonntag is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Languages & Cultures of Asia. Her doctoral thesis, “Photography and Mapping Russian Conquest in Central Asia: Early Albums, Encounters & Exhibitions 1866-1876,” investigates the photographic representations and other visual documents related to Russian imperialism in Central Asia in the 19th century. Sonntag also worked as a volunteer intern at the Library of Congress, where she assisted in the translation and cataloguing of captions and text associated with the Turkestan Album.
Concert: Vladislava Henderson, piano
Thursday, February 16, 2008
Vladislava Henderson
Location: 8:00 PM, Farley's House of Pianos, 6522 Seybold Road
Valentine's concert benefiting the Madison Russian School.
Overture International Festival
Thursday, February 16, 2008
Featuring the UW Russian Folk Orchestra at 12:10 PM and Sergei Belkin with Russian accordion music at 2:55 PM. Please see the official website for details.
Concert: Shoghaken Armenian Ensemble
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Location: 8:00 PM, Great Hall, Memorial Union, 800 Langdon St
Sponsors: Madison World Music Festival, CREECA, Village Dance House, WORT/89.9 FM Community Radio
Funding from: the University of Wisconsin - Madison Anonymous Fund and the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission
About the Group: The Shoghaken Folk Ensemble was founded in 1991 by dudukist Gevorg Dabaghyan in Yerevan. The group uses only traditional Armenian instruments, maintaining an authentic sound with the duduk, zurna, dhol, kanon, kamancha, shvi, and other instruments. Singers Hasmik Harutyunyan and Aleksan Harutyunyan are known throughout Armenia, the former Soviet Union, and Europe for their unique interpretation of Armenian folk and ashoughagan (troubadour) music.
"Kazakh Chinggisids and their Lands under Russian Rule in the 19th Century"
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Virginia Martin, Honorary Fellow, Central Asian Studies Program
Location: 4:00 PM, 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive
Sponsors: Central Asian Studies Program, CREECA
About the lecture: Virginia Martin’s current research investigates the changing Kazakh political culture in the 19 th century, with a focus on the elite “White Bone” Chinggisids. This talk offers a case study of the fate of one piece of disputed land in the Middle Horde Kazakh steppe that one Chinggisid family claimed both as inherited patrimony and as property protected under imperial laws. Through analysis of mostly archival sources, Martin explores the intersection of land and politics at a time (beginning in the 1820s) when the Russian Empire worked more directly than ever before to restrict nomadic land use and to make Middle Horde Kazakhs, now deprived of a “legitimate” khan, into loyal subjects. In spite of the fact that the government sought through the 1850s to enhance the status and priveleges of Chinggisid “Sultans” who worked with the steppe administration, empirical evidence shows that these nomadic elites faced enormous challenges in maintaining “traditional” land use strategies and the power over non-Chinggisids that accompanied their land claims. This case study is meant to lay groundwork for a rethinking of the process by which Kazakh nomadic society and politics adapted to Russian rule.
About the speaker: Virginia Martin is currently Honorary Fellow of the Central Asian Studies Program at UW-Madison and Chief Editor of the Central Eurasian Studies Review (the publication of the Central Eurasian Studies Society). She is the author of Law and Custom in the Steppe: the Middle Horde Kazakhs and Russian Colonial Rule in the 19 th Century (Curzon, 2001) and “Kazakh Oath-Taking in Colonial Courtrooms: Legal Culture and Russian Empire-Building” in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, 3 (Summer 2004): 483-514, among other publications. She taught for over 10 years in the History Department of the University of Alabama in Huntsville before moving with her family to Madison in January 2007."Legal Connections: Litigation, Supervision, and Sovereignty in Late Imperial Russia"
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Jane Burbank, Professor of History and Russian and Slavic Studies, New York University
Location: 4:00 PM, 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive
About the lecture: This talk explores the connections between local legal actions and higher levels of legal authority in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century. Cases heard at lower-level courts and reviewed at higher instances open to scrutiny the ways that people at different levels interacted with imperial law. Litigation and legal supervision were mechanisms whereby the most basic elements of civic life--family and property--could be evaluated and potentially reconfigured. The agents of examination and transformation active in the web of legal connectivity came from the bottom, top, and middle of the polity. In another context she has described Russia's "umbrella of imperial law" as a fundamental element of imperial governance. In this paper she will look at a few spokes of this umbrella.
About the speaker: Jane Burbank, Professor of History and Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, earned her Ph.D. in Russian history from Harvard. Her research and teaching interests include Russian cultural and intellectual history and legal culture, imperial polities, and rural Russian culture. Her publication credits include the books Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905-1917 and Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917-1922. She has also authored countless articles in English, French and Russian on topics like Russian imperialism, law and citizenship.