The Slavonic Research Seminar runs most weeks during term, and brings together researchers from the Sub-Faculty of Slavonic Languages and Literatures, and the broader Slavonic studies community from across the University (including colleagues from History, Linguistics, Area Studies, etc.). Each term, after consultation across the Sub-Faculty, the seminar invites both external speakers, and a range of speakers from within Oxford, including dedicated sessions for graduate students, post-docs and early career researchers. In recent years, the seminar series has broadened its remit to cover a greater breadth of Slavonic, linguistic and interdisciplinary topics, in addition to its long-standing focus on Russian literature and culture. We have also diversified beyond the format of the hour-long seminar paper, to include roundtables, reading groups and workshops. The annual Ilchester lecture is the flagship event of the year, attracting world-renowned scholars (past speakers include Eric Naiman, Simon Franklin, Natalia Nowakowska, Knut Grimstad, Julie Cassiday, Kirill Tomoff and Mark Lipovetsky).
All sessions, except where indicated otherwise, take place on Thursdays 5-7pm, in room 2 of the Taylor Institution, St Giles. Papers are followed by Q&A and drinks. All welcome!
Week 1 (15 October): Welcome and introduction
Week 2 (22 October): Natalia Grinina (Humboldt University): ‘Island Russia’: Insularity, History, and the Political Imagination of Bounded Space in a Continental Empire (from M. M. Shcherbatov to V. Tsymbursky)
Week 3 (29 October): Jan Tlustý (Masaryk University, Brno): Central Europe through Train Windows: Jaroslav Rudiš and Winterberg's Last Journey.
Week 4 (5 November): DPhil research in the sub-faculty:
Anastasia Oleshchuk, Making the Reader from the People: Literary Anthologies and National Belonging after the Emancipation of 1861
Magdalena Blincoe-Deval, Guardians of Memory: Narrating the Holodomor in Ukrainian Children’s Literature
Week 5: due to ASEEES, there will be no seminar on the Thursday. There will instead be a brown-bag (bring your own lunch) seminar on Tuesday 10th Nov., 12:15pm, in Goodhart Seminar room (Univ.).
Susanne Schattenberg (Bremen), ‘For your and our freedom’. The poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya and her fight for human rights in the 1960s.
Week 6 (19 November): Julie Curtis will lead a collective discussion of Mikhail Durnenkov’s 2024 play, Eizenshtein (copies will be circulated nearer the time)
Week 7 (26 November): James Rann (Glasgow):Top Hats and Leather Jackets: Rethinking Early Soviet Culture through Clothes
Week 8 (3 December): Philip Gleissner (Trinity College Dublin): Disappearing Print: The Queer Body of Russian Literature between Two Regimes of Censorship
Convenors: Polly Jones, Tamar Koplatadze, Philip Bullock
The Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages aims to provide seminar environments that are welcoming, supportive and safe, where diversity and inclusion are valued, and where scholars of all career-stages and backgrounds are entitled to be treated with courtesy and respect while engaging in academic debate.