CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

Bukovina, a former borderland of the Habsburg empire now divided between Ukraine and Romania, was a place of mutual observation, competition, and conflict between the different states and governments that laid claim to the territory. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the province experienced repeated regime changes – many of which occurred seemingly overnight. This talk explores how the shared challenges of governing Bukovina facilitated mutual influences between regimes that otherwise viewed each other as ideological opposites. About the Speaker: Cristina Florea is an Assistant Professor in Modern European history at Cornell University, researching and teaching the histories of Eastern and Central Europe and the Soviet Union in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on borderlands, imperial entanglements and competition, and the interplay of nationalisms and empires in the region.

Dr. Lucey considers how Russia’s writers and artists popularized images of madams and procuresses as manipulative and greedy figures who tricked and abused the women in their charge. Portrayed as far more heinous than the men who frequented brothels, the madam looms in literature and fine art as a trafficker in human flesh who goes against God and nature in the pursuit of profit. Yet, as historians of imperial Russia have shown, the experience of brothel madams working under the state system of administrative supervision (nadzor) was far more complex than reflected in visual and print culture. Learn how the image of the madam evolved in nineteenth-century Russia and why such figures evoked heated debate about the rights of women and the regulation of commercial sex. About the Speaker: Colleen Lucey, PhD, is assistant professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on gender and sexuality in nineteenth-century Russian literature and visual culture. She is the author of Love for Sale: Representing Prostitution in Imperial Russia (Cornell University Press, 2021).

Iryna Januszek is one of the many Ukrainians who found a life in Poland in the post-Soviet era, but Ukraine has never been far from her thoughts. Members of family remained there and participated in the movements to build a new society. She also shares those aspirations which brought Ukrainians to fight for freedom and association with Europe. Now the war has brought millions of Ukrainians to Poland as refugees, and she has been working to help them adjust to life there. She has many insights into how these closely-related but different people are interacting in this crisis. About the Speaker: After obtaining her degree in German and English philology in 2000, Iryna moved to western Poland and was hired as a language teacher. She now owns her own language school, Success Factory. She is now founding a nonprofit to assist young refugees.

How did African American visitors and residents of Soviet Central Asia imagine their Central Asian counterparts? Through an exploration of their writings, we can see how African Americans envisioned a shared historical and racial bond between themselves and Central Asians. About the Speaker: Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of Pennsylvania and a Penn Presidential Ph.D. Fellow. Her work examines how the presence of people of color shaped ideas and understandings of race, ethnicity, and nationality policy in the Soviet Union, East Germany, and post-Soviet space. She is a regular commentator on Russian, Ukrainian and American affairs in national media outlets.

7.21.22 Henry Misa provides an almost two-thousand-year-long context for the modern climate crisis in Central Eurasia. He gives an overview of climatic and environmental change in Central Eurasia stretching from around 400 to the 1960s, and discusses the ongoing debates within the historiography of climate and society in Central Eurasia with a focus on the medieval period. Amanda Wooden brings together mining histories, political ecology, and modern environmental perceptions in Kyrgyzstan. The history of mining in Kyrgyzstan connects extractivist colonization, post-Soviet neoliberalism, and contemporary national climate change politics. During the aftermath of the Soviet Union disbanding, the Canadian mining company Cameco developed the largest productive gold field in Kyrgyzstan, Kumtor, the only open pit mine in the world removing glacial ice to access ore. Wooden outlines conceptualizations of these mountains and glaciers over time, including today’s renewed socio-nature ideas competing with modernistic views of these lively geological bodies. Amanda E. Wooden is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. Henry Misa is a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University, Department of History, specializing in premodern Central Asian history.

Dr. Kassenova shares the history of Soviet nuclear tests in the Kazakh steppe, their harm to the people and the environment, and the story of the public anti-nuclear movement that led to the closure of the nuclear testing site. She also explains why Kazakhstan decided to give up its nuclear inheritance, including more than a thousand nuclear weapons, more than a hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles, tons of nuclear materials, and critical nuclear infrastructure. Dr. Togzhan Kassenova is a Washington, DC-based senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research, SUNY-Albany and a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is an expert on nuclear politics, WMD nonproliferation, and financial crime prevention. Dr. Togzhan Kassenova is a Washington, DC-based senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research, SUNY-Albany and a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is an expert on nuclear politics, WMD nonproliferation, and financial crime prevention

By focusing predominantly on discourse production and language management, language policy research de-emphasizes the material sources of inequality. The lecture argues that language management, often restricted by ritualistic and symbolic gestures, cannot rectify historically formed relations of power and calls for critical examination of both sociolinguistic and socio-economic consequences of language reforms. About the Speaker: Juldyz Smagulova is Associate Professor and Dean of College of Humanities and Education, KIMEP University (Almaty, Kazakhstan). Her research interests include language ideology, language education, and language policy. She co-edited the Language Change in Central Asia (2016) and co-authored the bilingual Kazakh-Russian Dictionary of Sociolinguistics (2020). She has articles published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics, the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, World Englishes and the International Journal of Bilingualism.

This lecture presents research findings on the reasons for Chechen population growth in times of harshness. The investigation begins with an observation of a quite contradictory nature: Chechens would not postpone creating families in times of war (1994-1996 and 1999-2009). Being based on demographic statistics, which imply longitudinal studies, the analysis goes back as far as 200-250 years ago, when the first estimates of Chechen population size were made. This lecture analyzes available statistical data of the censuses conducted in Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation, examined with the periods of harshness experienced by the Chechen nation. The analysis of these interviews revealed a strong link between reproductive motivation and two other variables, namely ethnic identity and population loss due to times of harshness. About the Speaker: Marat Iliyasov is a graduate of Vilnius University, where he obtained his MA in Diplomacy and International Relations. His second MA comes from Ilia State University, and he holds a PhD from the School of International Relations of the University of St Andrews in Scotland. His current work comes to the crossroad of several disciplines, among which are: International Relations, Ethnography, and Political Demography. Dr. Iliyasov is an author of several publications that analyze migrants’ identity evolution, the demographic trends in the conflict and post-conflict societies, self-legitimation of authoritarian governments, and politics of memory in autocracies.

Hannah Chapman presents a theory of how non-democratic regimes use seemingly democratic forms of communication and participation to bolster regime legitimacy and mitigate information dilemmas. She argues that autocrats develop and maintain participatory technologies—elite-mass communication strategies that promote increased interaction between the public and individuals in power—as a tool of legitimation and information management in authoritarian regimes. About the Speaker: Dr. Hannah Chapman is the Karen and Adeed Dawisha Assistant Professor of Political Science at Miami University and a faculty associate at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies. Her research examines political participation, information management, and public opinion in Russia and the former Soviet Union.

Panel Discussion with Kathryn Ciancia, Lukasz Wodzynski, Krzysztof Borowski, and Brian Porter-Szucs : December 13, 2021, marked the 40th Anniversary of the Declaration of the Martial Law, the Communist Government’s violent attempt to quell a civic mass movement that gave millions of Poles hope for a better future. It marked the end of the “carnival of Solidarity,” ushering in a new era of brutality and repression. Despite the ultimate defeat of communism in East-Central Europe, the shadow of Martial Law still looms large in Poland’s cultural memory. This panel discussion seeks to address Martial Law’s troubled cultural and historical legacies, particularly in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Polish-Belarussian border crisis, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.