Ballet in the Cold War: The New York City Ballet’s 1962 Tour of the Soviet Union

This event will be held as a Zoom meeting: https://nyu.zoom.us/j/92920017194.  In October 1962, as the Cuban Missile Crisis raged, New York City Ballet (NYCB) toured the Soviet Union, performing seventeen ballets by George Balanchine. The tour was part of the Soviet-American cultural exchange, arranged by the governments of the US and USSR as part of their Cold War strategies. The…

Painters, the Art Market, and Images of Female Beauty in Russia, 1830-1860 (with Margaret Samu)

This event will be held as a Zoom meeting: https://nyu.zoom.us/j/99102207490.   Russian painters of the mid-nineteenth century faced a difficult art market. Even the most talented of them—trained as history painters to produce large-scale canvases of biblical and historical subjects—found little demand for such works from the church or the state after finishing their training. Meanwhile, the number of artists…

Statuary Performances: Neo-Paganism and Memory in the American and Russian Far Right

This event will be held virtually as a Zoom meeting: https://nyu.zoom.us/j/98726318935.   Whether it be of Robert E. Lee, Tsar Nicholas II, Huey Long or the head of the NKVD Feliks Dzerzhinsky, political statuary evokes a range of impassioned responses from groups as varied as the Proud Boys and Identity Evropa in the United States, and the Double-Headed Eagle and…

How Pro-Government “Trolls” Influence Online Conversations in Russia

This event will be held virtually as a Zoom meeting: https://nyu.zoom.us/j/96312687337.  In this talk, Dr. Anton Sobolev will unpack the technology of the Russian government propaganda and manipulation of online discussions, and establishes the causal effect of government interventions on the online behavior of social media users. Using a novel database on the activity of the state-sponsored online propagandists masquerading…

Making an Anti-imperialist Empire: Revolutionary Russia and the Muslim World

This event will be held virtually as a Zoom meeting: https://nyu.zoom.us/j/97534375287.  Professor Norihiro Naganawa will present on his ongoing book project, which explores early Soviet Russia’s engagement with Central Asia, Iran and the Red Sea through a biography of one Tatar revolutionary and Soviet diplomat, Karim Abdraufovich Khakimov (1890-1938). With Putin’s Russia returning to the Middle East against a backdrop…

Jewish Life in Late Antiquity

Online

Thanks to the order of a Roman Emperor from 321 CE that allowed the municipal council of the Roman colony at the site of modern-day Cologne to compel Jews to service, we know that Jews were part of late Roman society in the northern European provinces at least 17 centuries ago. A tiny ring of similar age bearing a menorah…

Free

ISLAM AND THE DEVOTIONAL OBJECT: A DISCUSSION

Part of the Silsila Spring 2021 Lecture Series, Translations Link to Register here The past decade has seen a proliferation of scholarship on material dimensions of Islamic belief and practice. From amulets to devotional paintings, shrine visitation and relics, a range of subjects once marginal to the historical study of Islam is now attracting attention in disciplines ranging from art history and anthropology…

“Red and Brown”: Left-Patriotism in Russia, its Ideology and Social Base, 1993-2021

This event will be held virtually as a Zoom meeting: https://nyu.zoom.us/j/97955477217.  In the brief civil war that followed the collapse of the USSR, Boris Yeltsin’s pro-Western government was opposed by a strange coalition that the neoliberal media called “the communofascists” or “the red- and-browns.” These clichés were part of a campaign to discredit and de-humanize the resistance to the radical…

Russia’s Worlds: The Russian and Soviet North Pacific

This event will be held virtually as a Zoom webinar and streamed via YouTube Live. There will be no in-person event. Register here for the Zoom webinar, or tune in on YouTube Live. Please join us for an event in the Russia's Worlds Lecture Series, a discussion with Bathsheba Demuth (Brown University) and Ilya Vinkovetsky (Simon Fraser University). BIOGRAPHIES Bathsheba Demuth is Assistant…

Arabic Lecture Series: The Economic Crisis in Lebanon // الأزمة الاقتصادية في لبنان

The Hagop Kevorkian Center and the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU kindly invite you to join us on February 22 at 12:30pm NYC / 7:30pm Beirut for the first Arabic lecture of the semester: “The Economic Crisis in Lebanon” by renowned economist Kamal Hamdan, featuring discussant Jad Ghosn. Dr. Hamdan will offer insight on the current…