These talks will take place in Michaelmas and Lent Terms on Thursdays at 5:30pm in the Knox Shaw Room at Sidney Sussex College.
Michaelmas Term
October 15 2026
Anna Berman (University of Cambridge)
"Writing as Man and Woman: Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya and the Problem of Gender"
Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya (1821-89) was once considered one of Russia’s greatest writers. Her life and works offer a bundle of contradictions around gender. A contrarian on the woman question, she published all her fiction under a male pseudonym, who became her alter-ego, enabling her to live and write as both man and woman.
November 5 2026
Geneviève Zubrzycki (University of Michigan)
"The Aesthetics of Nationalism in Poland"
November 26 2026
Harsha Ram (University of California, Berkeley)
The Poetics and Politics of Friendship
What did friendship mean in the politically charged Stalin era? The creative collaboration between Boris Pasternak and his literary counterparts in the Soviet republic of Georgia offers a means to explore the role of friendship and hospitality in mediating the transition from modernist coterie culture to Soviet literature as a multiethnic institution.
Lent Term
January 28 2027
Rossen Djagalov (New York University)
"Social Class and Multinational Soviet Literature in the Stalin Era"
February 11 2027
Emily Van Buskirk (Rutgers University)
“The Essayistic in Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories and Grossman’s Everything Flows”
February 25 2027
Tamara Hundorova (Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine)
“Ukrainian Occidentalism and Provincialization of Europe”
The lecture focuses on discussions of Occidentalism in Ukrainian displaced persons camps in 1946 - 1948. The notion of the 'provincialisation of Europe' serves as a framework for Occidentalist debates. At the centre of the analysis are the ideas of two eminent Ukrainian intellectuals: Yuri Shevelov (1908–2002) and Volodymyr Yaniv (1908 - 1991). The debate on the crisis of Europe and Eurocentrism provides a platform to conceptualise Ukrainian self-identification and the history of Ukrainian decolonial thoughts in the post-World War II period.
March 11 2027
Barbara Skinner (Indiana State University)
“Russia’s Religious Conquest of its Western Empire (1800-1850)”