Centre for Russian Studies: Seminar Series 2010-11

Mondays 5.15pm - Room 347 SSEES (16 Taviton Street), London, WC1H 0BW

Centre for Russian Studies
Convenor: Maria Rubins

In the 2010-2011 academic year, CRS seminars will feature presentations from international experts on a range of topics dealing with Russian culture, history, thought and politics.

Russian Cinema Research Group: "Cinema of the Soviet Period"
Convenors: Philip Cavendish and Julian Graffy, SSEES, UCL

The Russian Cinema Research Group was founded at SSEES in 2002. This term its seminars will all take a comparative approach to the study of the cinema of the Soviet period. The first will compare the representation of visual space in the films about World War Two of the Stalinist and Thaw periods. The second will look at the career of Mikhail Kalatozov, most famous for his Thaw masterpiece The Cranes are Flying, from the vantage point of his beginnings in the 1920s. The third will examine a Thaw period film by Iuliia Solntseva in the context of the imagery and attitudes of the 1930s.

Information on the SSEES film collection

Information about recent activities by members of the Russian Cinema Research Group

• October 18 (RCRG)
  Andrei Shcherbenok (Royal Society Newton International Fellow, Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies, University of Sheffield)
  Suturing Zoya's Wounds: Visual Space in Stalinist and Thaw WWII Cinema

• October 25 (CRS)
  Alexei Miller (Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Manchester University; Central European University; Russian Academy of Sciences)
  Twenty-First Century History and Politics in Russia in the Context of Eastern and Central Europe

• October 27 (CRS NB. Lunchtime Lecture 2pm, Room 432)
  Barbara Engel (University of Colorado)
  Family Despotism and the Rights of the Person: The Politics of the Personal in Late Imperial Russia

• November 8 (RCRG)
  Sergei Kapterev (Nauchno-issledovatel´skii institut kinoiskusstva, Moscow)
  Kalatozov. The Beginnings

  The talk will include a showing of the fifteen extant minutes of Kalatozov's debut film, the documentary Mati Samepo / Ikh tsarstvo / Their Kingdom / A Page from a Biography (Goskinprom Gruzii, 1928), recently discovered by Sergei Kapterev.

• November 29 (CRS)
  Otto Boele (Leiden University)
  Rebels, Rumours, and Role Models: Mikhail Artsybashev's 'Sanin' (1907) and the Search for New Sincerity in Late Imperial Russia

• December 6 (RCRG)
  Milena Michalski (King's College, London)
  More Than Merely Molecules of Enthusiasm: Iuliia Solntseva's 'Poema o more' (Poem of the Sea, 1958) in the Context of 1930s Construction Films

• December 13 (CRS)
  Victoria Frede (University of California, Berkeley)
  Russian Volterianism in the 18th Century

• January 10 SSEES GUEST LECTURE
  Mikhail Epstein (Emory University)
  Ideas against Ideocracy: The Platonic Drama of Russian Thought

• January 17 (CRS)
  Simon Dixon (UCL-SSEES)
  Celebrity Monks in Late Imperial Russia

• January 24 (RCRG)
  JJ Gurga (UCL-SSEES)
  Remembering (in) the Dovzhenko Studio Films of the 1960s: The Case of 'Bilyi khmary' ('Belye tuchi'), Rolan Serhiienko, 1968

• January 31 (CRS)
  David Bethea (Oxford University/University of Wisconsin)
  Darwin and Solov´ev

• 15 February (CRS: Please note this is a Tuesday)
  David Brandenberger (Richmond University, USA)
  Propaganda State in Crisis: Stalinism during the 1930s

• February 28 (CRS)
  Diane Koenker (University of Illinois)
  Tourism, Vacations, and Socialist Consumption in the Post-Stalin USSR

• March 14 (RCRG)
  Eugenie Zvonkine (Université de Paris, 8)
  The Unpublished Scripts and the Unfinished Projects of Kira Muratova: Reconstructing the Coherence of an Oeuvre

• May 9 (RCRG) (NB: Venue: Room 431 of the SSEES Building)
  Muireann Maguire (Wadham College Oxford)
  The Warped Woof: The Guard Dog Archetype in Soviet Cinema

Further lectures to be confirmed.

Talks last 45-60 minutes. Everyone is welcome.

Contact e-mail: Alexa Stewart a.stewart@ssees.ucl.ac.uk
Phone: 020 7679 8775

This page last modified Wednesday 2 March 2011.