Symposium: The Soviet Collapse: History, Geopolitics, Society, Culture, Memory
About the Symposium:
How did the end of the USSR in 1991 shape Russia, Eurasia, and the world we live in today? How does the collapse of the Soviet Union look differently on its thirtieth anniversary than it did in 2001 and 2011? Can new understandings of 1991 affect our prognosis for the future of the region? This roundtable discussion brings together outstanding scholars from the fields of History, Political Science, Sociology, and Slavic/Cultural Studies. Join us for a rare and noteworthy interdisciplinary symposium.
About the Speakers:
Joel Hellman is Dean of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. He has a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University and an M.Phil. from the University of Oxford in Russian and East European Studies. Before coming to Georgetown, he served as a faculty member in the Department of Government at Harvard University, the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, and as Chief Institutional Economist at the World Bank.
Michael David-Fox is Director of CERES and Professor in SFS and History at Georgetown. He also serves as Executive Editor of Kritika: Exploration in Russian and Eurasian Studies and Scholarly Advisor at the Institute for Advanced Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at the Higher School of Economics. His most recent book is Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh University Press) and he is now completing Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Nazi and Soviet Rule for Harvard University Press.
Kathryn Stoner is Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. She is Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford and a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution. Her most recent book is Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Eliot Borenstein is Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies and Senior Academic Convenor for the Global Network at New York University. He is author, most recently, of Pussy Riot: Speaking Punk to Power (Bloomsbury) and Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism (Cornell University Press). He is now writing Unstuck in Time: On the Post-Soviet Uncanny.
Olga Shevchenko is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Williams College, where she teaches courses on social theory, postsocialism, sociology of consumer culture, photography, and social memory. She is the author of Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow (Indiana University Press), and the editor of Double Exposure: Memory and Photography (Transaction Publishers). Her articles on post-Soviet political culture, nostalgia, consumption and family photographic archives have appeared in such journals as Europe-Asia Studies, Journal of Consumer Culture, Slavic Review and Social Psychology Quarterly, as well as a number of edited volumes and collections.
Kathleen E. Smith, Professor at Georgetown’s CERES, is author of two books on memory and politics in post-Soviet Russia: Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR and Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics and Memory in the Yeltsin Era (both by Cornell University Press). Her most recent book is Moscow 1956: A Silenced Spring (Harvard University Press). She is now engaged in a new research project on Peredelkino, the “Writers’ Village” created by Stalin.
Stephen Kotkin is the John P. Birkelund ’52 Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University, with a joint appointment in the Princeton School for Public and International Affairs, where he was previously vice dean. He has served on the core editorial committee of the World Politics and chair of the editorial board at Princeton University Press. His books include Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (University of California Press) and Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (Oxford University Press). His most recent book is the second of a projected three-volume study of the life and times of Joseph Stalin, namely Stalin, Vol. II: Waiting for Hitler, 1928–1941 (Penguin Press).
This event is sponsored by Georgetown University’s Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies (CERES) and funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Accommodation requests related to a disability should be sent toceres@georgetown.edu by 11/30/2021. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill requests. Additionally, the presentation will be recorded and a captioned version will also be made available shortly after at CERES Georgetown’s YouTube channel.