The talks will take place in Michaelmas and Lent Terms on Thursdays from 5:30pm in the Knox Shaw Room in Sidney Sussex College
Michaelmas Term 2025
30 October 2025
Ekaterina Schulmann (Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, Berlin)
“Surrogates of Freedom: Authoritarian Rituals of Power and Citizens’ Notions of Liberty”
13 November 2025
Benjamin Paloff (University of Michigan)
“Provocation: Between Free Expression and Compelled Action in Late Communist Poland”
27 November 2025
Victoria Donovan (University of St Andrews)
“Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East”
Lent Term 2026
29 January 2026
Stephen Lovell (King’s College London)
“Free Choice? A History of the Secret Ballot in Russia”
Russia might look like an anti-constitutional and illiberal outlier in European history, but it was an early adopter of a practice that is often taken as a hallmark of liberal democracy: the secret ballot. Why did the Russian Empire and its successors need voting, and why were they so concerned to safeguard the role of the individual voter? How far did Russia's version of the secret ballot extend, how did it work, and what did it achieve?
12 February 2026
Andrew Kahn (University of Oxford)
"On Freedom in All the World on a Page in the Light of Vladimir Markov’s O svobode v poezii (1994) and Stephanie Sandler’s The Freest Speech in Russia (2025)"
Drawing on a selection of lyrics discussed in the book, Andrew Kahn’s part of the seminar will discuss these poems as examples of of a four-fold typology of freedom and poetry defined broadly as: aesthetic practice; self-legislation; the symbolic; and the political
Mark Lipovetsky (Columbia University)
Where the Poem Happens: Contexts of Writing and Contexts of Reading
Despite Susan Sontag’s famous attack on interpretation, interpretations have prevailed, including in the field of poetry criticism. However, most contemporary interpretations try to avoid answering the high-school notorious question: what did the author want to say through their work? Engaging less with the poem's “content” and more with its form and context (whether biographical, historical, or philosophical), is the most accessible way to avoid reductionism suggested by such a question. Looking back at the essays included in the book ‘All the World on a Page, Lipovetsky reflects on the nature of various contextual links discussed in the book and their effect on the interpretation of poetic texts. Can a contextual reading be decoupled from the authorial intentions? How does the poem’s form correlate with its context? What are the limits of contextual interpretation? Can a contextual interpretation be violent, and when is such violence justified?
26 February 2026
Balázs Trencsényi (Central European University)
“Freedom Lost and Found? Revisiting the Crisis of Liberalism in Interwar Europe”
12 March 2026
Eugénie Zvonkine (Université Paris VIII)
“Soviet Kyrgyzstan: Artistic Freedom in the Soviet Periphery”
The presentation will dwell on the tensions between the Soviet centre and national identity for Kyrgyz directors at their beginnings (Tolomush Okeev, for instance, with The Sky of our childhood) but also for directors who came to direct films in Kyrgyzstan while not being from Kyrgyz culture or upbringing and managed or failed to collaborate well with local artistic members and to get permeated by local culture and expectations (Znoy by Larisa Shepitko and First Teacher by Andrey Konchalovsky).
The analysis of these three cases will allow us to better understand the specific challenges of directing in a small and "peripheral" Soviet studio, the "horizon of expectation" (Jauss) not only of the spectators but also of the industry members, in the Soviet Kyrgyzstan and in Moscow, whether it is Mosfilm or the Central Goskino
We will also observe how the directors and their artistic crew either search for pre-conceived images of Asia or try to shape a new cinematic language inside the Soviet frame.