Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, “empire” and “modernity” have been proposed as particularly useful frameworks for the comparatively oriented and globally relevant research on Russia and the Soviet Union. Surprisingly enough, there was little exchange and cross-traffic between these two major clusters of innovation in the field of Russian and Soviet studies. By introducing the concept of Soviet…

Please join the East Central European Center at the Harriman Institute for a roundtable discussion in celebration of National Translation Month. This year’s roundtable features four translators presenting current projects, all texts by exciting, contemporary, and up-and-coming East-Central European women writers. Topics will include issues of migration, exile, gender and sexuality, ethnicity, and feminism. The program will include literary readings from recently translated works, including Ivana…

Organized in the wake of World War Two by the victorious Allies, the Nuremberg Trials were intended to hold the Nazis to account for their crimes and to restore a sense of justice to a world devastated by violence. As Francine Hirsch reveals in her groundbreaking new book, a major piece of the Nuremberg story has routinely been left out:…

Read and discuss Scandinavian literature in translation as part of our Nordic Book Club, now online! Each month we select a novel from some of the best Nordic literary voices. Discussions have typically taken place the last Tuesday of the month at Scandinavia House but will now be taking place bi-weekly as an online meeting. Book club participants will all…

Rachel Kaufman's first poetry collection, Many to Remember (Dos Madres Press, 2021), enters the archive’s unconscious to reveal the melodies hidden within the language of the past. The collection unravels Kaufman's historical research on New Mexican crypto-Judaism and the Mexican Inquisition alongside the poet’s own family histories. This presentation will explore questions of history, memory, mythology, and translation. How can poetry translate history and the rhythms and form of the archive?…

Please join us for the inaugural event of our Work of Care in Russia speaker series, a presentation by Maria Galmarini-Kabala (College of William & Mary). The Soviet system of care and social protection involved both the distribution of monetary help through the Pensioning Department of the Commissariat (later Ministry) of Social Assistance and the implementation of social policies in such diverse fields as…

Join Professor Jane S. Gerber and Dr. Noam Sienna as they discuss their research from the new bookJews and Muslims in Morocco: Their Intersecting Worlds. Multiple traditions of Jewish origins in Morocco emphasize the distinctiveness of Moroccan Jewry as indigenous to the area, rooted in its earliest settlements and possessing deep connections and associations with the historic peoples of the…

Sholem Aleichem's Moshkeleh Ganev was a first for Yiddish literature in featuring as its hero a rowdy, uneducated horse thief. The novel is unique for its focus on the underclass and portrayal of Jews interacting with non-Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement. Breaking norms, it centers on characters on the fringe of respectability. Originally written in 1903 and published three times, in…