Professor Valerie Kivelson Tuesday 11 November 2014, 5-6.30pm Clare College, Latimer Room

The Department of Slavonic Studies is delighted to host Professor Valerie Kivelson as the next speaker in the fortnightly joint Departmental & CamCREES seminar series, on Tuesday 11 November. Our distinguished guest will be speaking on a subject of particular relevance to students of SLA3/SL1 (hint hint!), providing copious illustrations in her fascinating exploration of the visual representation of Muscovite imperialism. See you there!

Talk Abstract: In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, between the reign of Ivan the Terrible and that of Peter the Great, Muscovite Russian forces swept eastward, conquering, colonizing, and controlling territories reaching from the Volga to the Pacific. While early modern European thinkers such as Las Casas, Sepulveda, Hobbes and Locke pondered the pragmatics and ethics of imperial conquest, Muscovites wasted little time on theory.  In the absence of textual treatises, visual depictions of bloody battles, ruthless punishment, and colonial rule reveal surprising patterns, with significant, and unexpected, implications for understanding Russian policies of imperial incorporation.

About the speaker: Valerie Kivelson (PhD Stanford University) teaches at the University of Michigan.  Her publications include Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2013); Cartographies of Tsardom:  The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth

Century Russia (2006), and Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, co-edited with Joan Neuberger (2008)

.