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Polish Studies Initiative Lecture: "Likes Don't Count" by Marci Shore

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February 25, 2016
3:00PM - 5:00PM
Mendenhall Lab 115

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Add to Calendar 2016-02-25 15:00:00 2016-02-25 17:00:00 Polish Studies Initiative Lecture: "Likes Don't Count" by Marci Shore “This is a civilization that needs metaphysics,” Adam Michnik told Václav Havel in 2003. A decade later, on November 21, 2013, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych unexpectedly reversed the course of his own stated foreign policy and declined to sign an association agreement with the European Union. Around 8 p.m. that day a thirty-two year-old Afghan-Ukrainian journalist, Mustafa Nayem, posted a note on his Facebook page: “Come on, let’s get serious. Who is ready to go out to the Maidan”—Kiev’s central square—“by midnight tonight? ‘Likes’ don’t count.” No one then knew that “likes don’t count”—a sentence that would have made no sense before Facebook—would bring about the return to metaphysics to Eastern Europe. Marci Shore is associate professor of history at Yale University. She is the translator of Michał Głowiński's The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968 and The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. Currently she is finishing a manuscript titled ‘It was My Choice’: Reflections on the Revolution in Ukraine (forthcoming, Yale University Press); she is also at work on a longer book project titled “Phenomenological Encounters: Scenes from Central Europe.” Her recent essays include “Surreal Love in Prague” (TLS);  “Out of the Desert: A Heidegger for Poland” (TLS); “Rescuing the Yiddish Ukraine (New York Review of Books); “Rachelka’s Tablecloth: Poles and Jews, Intimacy and Fragility ‘on the Periphery of the Holocaust,’” (Tr@nsit Online); “Can We See Ideas?  On Evocation, Experience, and Empathy” (Modern European Intellectual History); “Entscheidung am Majdan: Eine Phänomenologie der Ukrainischen Revolution” (Lettre International); and “Reading Tony Judt in Wartime Ukraine,” The New Yorker.Co-sponsored by Germanic Languages and Literatures, the Humanities Institute, and the Seminar in Russian, East European, and Eurasian History.For more information, please contact Daniel Pratt (pratt.247@osu.edu). Mendenhall Lab 115 Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies cseees@osu.edu America/New_York public

“This is a civilization that needs metaphysics,” Adam Michnik told Václav Havel in 2003. A decade later, on November 21, 2013, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych unexpectedly reversed the course of his own stated foreign policy and declined to sign an association agreement with the European Union. Around 8 p.m. that day a thirty-two year-old Afghan-Ukrainian journalist, Mustafa Nayem, posted a note on his Facebook page: “Come on, let’s get serious. Who is ready to go out to the Maidan”—Kiev’s central square—“by midnight tonight? ‘Likes’ don’t count.” No one then knew that “likes don’t count”—a sentence that would have made no sense before Facebook—would bring about the return to metaphysics to Eastern Europe. 

Marci Shore is associate professor of history at Yale University. She is the translator of Michał Głowiński's The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968 and The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. Currently she is finishing a manuscript titled ‘It was My Choice’: Reflections on the Revolution in Ukraine (forthcoming, Yale University Press); she is also at work on a longer book project titled “Phenomenological Encounters: Scenes from Central Europe.” Her recent essays include “Surreal Love in Prague” (TLS);  “Out of the Desert: A Heidegger for Poland” (TLS); “Rescuing the Yiddish Ukraine (New York Review of Books); “Rachelka’s Tablecloth: Poles and Jews, Intimacy and Fragility ‘on the Periphery of the Holocaust,’” (Tr@nsit Online); “Can We See Ideas?  On Evocation, Experience, and Empathy” (Modern European Intellectual History); “Entscheidung am Majdan: Eine Phänomenologie der Ukrainischen Revolution” (Lettre International); and “Reading Tony Judt in Wartime Ukraine,” The New Yorker.

Co-sponsored by Germanic Languages and Literatures, the Humanities Institute, and the Seminar in Russian, East European, and Eurasian History.

For more information, please contact Daniel Pratt (pratt.247@osu.edu).