Dear CEERES Friends and Associates,
It is with a heavy heart that we welcome you to the start of the 2020-2021 year at the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Center. Our deepest condolences go out to Robert Bird’s family, friends, colleagues, and students. Everyone at CEERES will miss him dearly. William Nickell’s lovely tribute to Robert can be found at the East from Chicago blog, which CEERES launched in cooperation with Robert.
The coming year will look very different here at CEERES, but we plan to continue to work with you to support scholarship and education related to our region at the University of Chicago and beyond. We have a new website (at the same address as the old one). We hope this new website will help connect you to events, courses, and resources on the CEERES region.
Of course, like everyone we have made the transition to remote work. CEERES staff continues to work from home, but do not hesitate to reach out. We are just as eager to help you virtually!
We have also moved our program of events online for the foreseeable future. In the late spring and summer we sponsored several virtual events, if you missed them you can find recordings here:
- Yiddish at the University of Chicago Presents: Mikhl Yashinsky, Theatrist and Yiddishist
- Miriam Tripaldi’s Neapolitan Cosmopolitan: Catherine the Great, Odessa, and 'O Sole Mio
- Teagan Wolter’s Uncovering a Lost Civilization: Archaeology and the Bronze Age
In the coming year, we are helping to support a robust program of online lectures, webinars, conferences, and other events which we hope you will take part in. For example, we are pleased to co-sponsor of two very important series:
- Area Studies Showcase Lecture Series: Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia: This lecture series is a collaborative effort to showcase an area studies specialist from each center focusing on the Russian, East European, and Central Asian world region. The next two lectures are:
- Tuesday, September 22 at 1:00 pm CT – “The Caucasus: From Geopolitics to Geopoetics” by Harsha Ram, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley. Hosted on the ISEEES @ UC Berkley YouTube page.
- Tuesday, September 29, 2020 at 1:00 pm CT – "Anatomy of a Successful Forgery: The Czech Manuscripts" by David Cooper, Associate Professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Register here.
- Race in Focus: From Critical Pedagogies to Research Practice and Public Engagement in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies: The series will comprise four segments: two pedagogy webinars; two lighting rounds on the experience of minority scholars in the field; and two roundtables featuring research by scholars of color and/or on racial minorities, concluding with a forum on the reception of the Black Lives Matter movement in our field.
Additionally, we are looking forward to continuing CEERES of Voices, our author series with the Seminary Co-op. The first author in this series will be Nina Jankowicz, who will discuss her book How to Lose the Information War with Konstantin Sonin on Tuesday, October 13. Register here.
We are also pleased to co-sponsor Degloabalizaiton and Antiglobalism in Central Europe, a virtual workshop organized by UChicago’s own Tara Zhara and Peter Becker (University of Vienna) as part of the Chicago Vienna Faculty Grant Program. The conference will take place on the second Friday of the month between November 2020 and February 2021. You can register for all four sessions here.
As the year progresses please keep an eye out for more information on a range of exciting events that we have planned, and don't hesitate to contact us with feedback or ideas. And of course our weekly CEERES eBulletin will return with the start of the academic year.
Sincerely,
Eugene Raikhel
Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Human Development
Director, Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies.
Esther Peters
Associate Director, Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies.