Registration will be available onsite at the conference.
The Midwest Slavic Association and The Ohio State University (OSU) Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (CSEEES) are pleased to announce the 2023 Midwest Slavic Conference to be held at OSU in Columbus, Ohio on March 24-26, 2023. The conference committee invites proposals for papers on all topics related to the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian world, particularly those related to the theme of displacement and diaspora. As war and other disasters continue in these regions, this theme will explore how war has displaced and damaged cultures, cultural artifacts, and cultural production. It will also provide students and scholars with the opportunity to think about how these horrors prompt cultures, societies, and languages to flourish and thrive while creating new centers and pulls across the globe when citizens are forced to flee.
The conference will open with a reception at the OSU Faculty Club (181 S Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210) from 5:30PM-7:00PM followed by the keynote address from 7:00PM-8:30PM by Dr. Valeria Sobol (U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign). Building on the keynote address, a plenary panel will follow on Saturday morning from 8:30AM-10:15AM at the Blackwell Inn and Conference Center (2110 Tuttle Park Pl., Columbus, OH 43210). Panels by conference participants will then be held on Saturday from 10:30AM-4:45PM and Sunday from 8:30AM-11:45AM. This year’s conference will also celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Society for Slovene Studies.
Registration Fees
Registration is REQUIRED to attend all conference events and activities. Registration will include entry to all conference panels as well as all special events listed in the Special Events section below.
NEW! Donated Registrations for Young Scholars of Slavic Studies
Want to support up and coming scholars in our field? This year we have created an option for faculty and independent scholars to donate conference registration(s) for undergraduate and graduate students who are participating as presenters or general attendees. This will allow students to enjoy the conference to the fullest extent.
Students who are interested in receiving a waiver code for donated registrations should email CSEEES at cseees@osu.edu. Donated registrations will be available on a first come, first served basis.
- Student Presenters: $35
- Faculty/Independent Scholars: $50
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General Attendees: $25
Special Events
Opening Reception and Keynote Address with Dr. Valeria Sobol (U. of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Friday, March 24, OSU Faculty Club, Main Dining Room on the 2nd Floor (181 S Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210)
- Opening Reception, 5:30PM-7:00PM
- Keynote Address, 7:00PM-8:30PM
"Gothic Displacements and the Russian Imperial Conquest: Literary Cases of Finland and Ukraine"
In this presentation, I will discuss how displacement—one of the key tropes of the literary Gothic tradition—assumes a new, urgent meaning in the context of the Russian imperial conquest. While Gothic literature is often perceived as divorced from a concrete historical or geographical reality, I will demonstrate that Gothic tropes, when examined in the context of the Russian empire and its assimilative tendencies, function as symptoms of deep anxieties about fluid imperial borders, national identities, and modernization. For my literary examples, I will focus on two texts from the early 1840s that represent the “Northern” and “Southern” poles of the Russian imperial Gothic: Vladimir Odoevsky’s novella “The Salamander,” partly set in Finland, and Panteleimon Kulish’s novel Mikhailo Charnyshenko, or Little Russia Eighty Years Ago, set in Ukraine. The talk is partly based on my relatively recent book, Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny (2020).
Plenary Panel
Saturday, March 25, 8:30-10:15AM Blackwell Inn and Conference Center (2110 Tuttle Park Pl., Columbus, OH 43210)
- Dr. Anna Barker (U. of Iowa)
- Dr. Philip Gleissner (Ohio State U.)
- Dr. Jarosław Szczepański (U. of Warsaw)
"Fostering Community and Solidarity in a Time of Plague: Uniting Readers Across the Globe Through Russian Literature" by Dr. Anna Barker (U. of Iowa)
With the beginning of global lockdowns in March of 2020, all intellectual debates and cultural exchanges moved to the virtual world where various cultural institutions offered respite from crushing isolation through book and film groups, opera, ballet and concert broadcasts, and art museum tours. On April 1, 2020, Dr. Barker started the first virtual literary tutorial through an Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature Facebook page dedicated to Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, written in Florence during the Great Plague (1346-1353). Baccaccio’s celebration of earthy humanity at a time of global health pandemic spoke to 2020 readers with renewed wisdom and vigor. The reading ended on July 10, but the lockdowns remained – and a sense of irretrievably lost opportunities and aspirations. These sentiments prompted the next reading – Paradise Lost by John Milton, written in the aftermath of the English Revolution and Civil War that disrupted the familiar bonds and connections of every facet of society. But the greatest interest by far was attracted by the two giants of Russian literature, Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, which Dr. Barker covered for 250 days in 2021. What started as a small gathering of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky fans on the 100 Days of War and Peace and 100 Days of Brothers Karamazov, turned into a global affair with thousands of participants on five continents reading the novels in Russian, English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Polish, and Georgian. Dr. Barker will examine her creative process and methodology, attempt to assess why it is the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky that appeal to 21st century readers on such a personal level and global scale.
"The Quotidian and the Crisis: Documenting the Immigrant Experience through Food Writing" by Dr. Philip Gleissner (Ohio State U.)
Travel restrictions, stay-at-home orders, and the breakdown of food supply chains and the restaurant industry were among the first noticeable impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Immigrants, whose lives are often built around continuous access to transnational mobility, tight-knight networks of mutual support, and labor in the service industry, were hit especially hard by this. As traditional research came to a brief halt in 2020, I developed together with my colleague Harry Eli Kashdan a project that aimed to give voice to these communities and document their struggles as well as their resilience, which resulted in the publication of our volume Resilient Kitchens: American Immigrant Cooking in a Time of Crisis. In this presentation, I will discuss the volume, our approach, and the potential of food writing for public humanities work especially with regard to the representation of immigrant voices.
Demopolitics, A Key to Understanding Modern Central-Eastern Europe and Beyond: Evidence from Poland" by Dr. Jarosław Szczepański (U. of Warsaw)
Modern International Relations are dominated by constructivism and geopolitical approaches. However, the latest events in the Old Continent challenge those methodologies. My hypothesis is that to understand modern Europe, a better approach is DEMOPOLITICS, a term first coined by Rudolf Kjellén in his 1916 book The State as a Form of Life. The People (which translates to employees, working force, military or ethnic groups) is what matters in Europe. In that perspective, the shift in Polish politics toward diaspora (Polonia and Poles abroad) and the institution of the Polish national card (Polish Card - Karta Polaka) between 2007 and 2019, along with the more recent governmental and collective answer—demonstrated by the actions and reactions of ordinary Poles—to the wave of migrants and refugees from Ukraine, can provide a piece of evidence of how demopolitics are shaping the Old Continent. Remarks given on Ukrainian refugees and migrants will also provide some insight into a demopolitical understanding of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Lunchtime Performance of Act I of Ivan Cankar's play Jakob Ruda with the Society for Slovene Studies
- Saturday, March 25, 12:15-1:15PM, Pfhal Hall, Room 202
- A light lunch will be served to attendees.
Midwest Slavic Association Meeting
- Saturday, March 25, 5:00-5:30PM
Student Mixer (undergraduate and graduate student event only)
- Saturday, March 25, 6:00-7:30PM
Wine Tasting with the Society for Slovene Studies (faculty and independent scholar event only)
- Saturday, March 25, 6:00-8:00PM
