Over the past decade the Department of Slavonic Studies has hosted a regular lecture series exploring a selected theme in Russian and East European Studies: Consumer Culture, National Identity, Display, Resistance. On Thursday 15 October we initiate our newest thematic lecture series: 'A Sense of Place'.
‘A Sense of Place’ explores the lived environment of East Europe, Russia and Eurasia through sensory awareness and human emotion. It examines the sounds and textures, scents and sights that produce a ‘sense of place’—that is, the practices, perceptions and emotions that shape the deeply felt character of a site. The talks in this series will consider how setting, language, imagery, perceptions and emotions interact to shape and condition a sense of place across the ages, from the medieval to the contemporary period.
Lilya Kaganovsky (University of Illinois) will give the inaugural talk of the series, entitled “The Arctic in the Russian Imagination”, on Thursday 15 October, at the Umney Theatre in Robinson College at 5:30pm. All welcome!
Abstract: This talk will focus on the ways the Russian “North” — the Arctic and Siberia — have been imagined through different historical/political moments of the early Soviet period to the present day. The talk will be divided roughly into five sections: 1) defining the “North” 2) the early Soviet period of expansion 3) Stalinist Polar exploration 4) the GULAG Archipelago, Siberia as the place of internment/incarceration; 5) and “erasure”: post-1992, the camps as lost sites of memory; oil and mineral extraction; the impact on indigenous populations. In examining these shifts in representation, the goal is to showcase how the Arctic in the Russian/Soviet imaginary is not static, but has been consistently reconfigured through various historical and ideological paradigms, each set to in some way erase or reconceive the historical imaginary that came before.
Bio: Lilya Kaganovsky is Associate Professor of Slavic, Comparative Literature, and Media & Cinema Studies, and the Director of the Program in Comparative & World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her publications include How the Soviet Man was Unmade (Pittsburgh, 2008); the edited volumes Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s (Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing, Duke, 2013) and Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema (Lilya Kaganovsky and Masha Salazkina, Indiana, 2014); and articles on Soviet and post-Soviet cinema. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema and regularly contributes film reviews to the on-line cinema journal KinoKultura. She is currently completing a book on Soviet cinema’s transition to sound (The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1928-1935; under contract with Indiana UP), and starting new work on early Soviet documentaries.
