Joe Brandesky co-presented the keynote address, “Welded Topiary-Iron Crown: Jaroslav Malina’s Sculptural Settings for Twelfth Night and Richard III,” at the Czech and Slovak Scenography for Shakespeare Conference at the University of Hull on Nov. 7. The conference is the first in a series of events for an international collaborative project focusing on Czech and Slovak adaptations of Shakespeare plays that will culminate in a symposium at Ohio State in the spring of 2017 and an exhibit at the Columbus Museum of Art.
Nick Breyfogle travelled to Lake Baikal and the Barguzin Nature Preserve in July as part of a multi-year Leverhulme Trust International Network Grant, “Exploring Russia's Environmental History and Natural Resources,” and in June he was invited to Poland to discuss his forthcoming edited book Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Russian and Soviet History. In 2015, he published “At the Watershed: 1958 and the Beginnings of Lake Baikal Environmentalism,” in Slavonic and East European Review and was co-editor of Technology, Ecology, and Human Health Since 1850, a thematic Forum in Environmental History.
Breyfogle is co-organizer of two coming conferences: “Water and Human Survival in Global Socio-Economic Perspective,” and “World War II and Environmental Changes in the United States.” In summer 2015, he developed a new course A History of the Arctic.
Angela Brintlinger published the article, “Rereading Bulgarin: Was Faddei Venediktovich a Scoundrel, and How Much Should That Concern Us?” with Benjamin Richards in A.S. Griboedov: epokha, lichnost’, tvorchestvo, sud’ba . She also presented versions of ongoing work on Khodasevich and Derzhavin at the University of Warsaw’s Artes Liberales in May, in Novgorod in September, and at the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies national convention. An article will be published in Russia in spring 2016.
While in Warsaw in May, Brintlinger was in residence at Artes Liberales; worked with students and faculty and the Center for American Studies; and attended the 12th annual Warsaw International Documentary Film Festival. She continues to write her blog, The Manic Bookstore Café, and also was invited to speak at The Big Ten Colloquium on Graduate Study in the Humanities at Penn State University in November.
Theodora Dragostinova served as a visiting fellow at the Institute for Eastern and Southeastern European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg, Germany in summer 2015, working on her book Communist Extravaganza: Bulgarian Cultural Diplomacy and the Global Cold War Order.
Theodora Dragostinova, Yana Hashamova, and Jessie Labov led a roundtable, "The Refugee Crisis in Europe: The View from Central and Southeast Europe" at Ohio State’s Mershon Center for International Security Studies on October 26.
Danielle Fosler-Lussier published Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy in May 2015. The volume includes a sizable chapter on U.S.-Soviet musical relations from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Helena Goscilo delivered the keynote “Contrary Imperatives: Culture and Society under Putin” at Eastern Kentucky University’s “What If?” Chautauqua lecture series. She also was invited to speak at the Museum of Miami University for “The New Janus: Russia’s Visual Identity in the 21st Century.” She presented “Text as Reinforcement, Clarification, or Superfluity in Posters: The Soviet Case” at the conference Text versus a Piece of Art at the University of Lodz.
Goscilo has recently written “Indivisibility and the Threads that Bind,” an introduction to Ludmila Ulitskaya and the Art of Tolerance by Benjamin Sutcliffe and Elizabeth Skomp, and “Narrating Trauma” in Russian Literature since 1991.
Yana Hashamova gave a lecture on the cultures of Bulgarian diaspora communities in the U.S. and Spain at the Institute for the Individual and Society within the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences on June 15. In November, she participated in a roundtable at the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies national convention discussing Keith Doubt's new book, Through the Window: Kinship and Elopement in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
David Hoffmann published the article "Stalin Rises from the Ashes in Putin's Russia" in The Moscow Times on April 14. He also presented a paper, "Stalinism in International Comparative Perspective," at the International Council for Central and East European Studies World Congress in Makuhari, Japan, in August 2015.
Brian Joseph, Carly Dickerson (a graduate student specializing in Albanian linguistics), and Carrie Ann Morgan (a recent CSEES M.A. graduate) took part in a conference in Prishtina, Kosovo on Albanian studies in America, September 25-26. Carly Dickerson presented "Burrnesha: Albanian Sworn Virgins and the Linguistic Expression of Gender Identity,” Brian Joseph "Përfytyrimi i shqipes ndër gjuhëtarët e hershëm amerikanë” (“Mention of Albanian by Early American Linguists”), and Carrie Ann Morgan" Ideologjitë gjuhësore në Tiranë” (“Linguistic Ideology in Tirana”).
Joseph was also one of a five-person international team doing fieldwork on multilingualism in southern Albania that conducted interviews in Palasa, a village near Himara, focusing on both the variety of Greek and the variety of Albanian used by speakers in the village and on their switching between the languages in different circumstances. For Joseph, this was part of an on-going study he is doing of Greek in southern Albania together with Dr. Christopher Brown from Ohio State’s Department of Classics.
Marianna Klochko, Alexey Serdyuk, Oleksandr Golovko and Olena Syniavska co-authored the chapter “On the fringes: Female prisoners in Ukraine, are they unique?” in Lives of Incarcerated Women: An International Perspective, to be released 2016.
Scott Levi received a $186,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to host a three-week institute, Central Asia in World History, in July 2016 for 25 K-12 teachers. The institute builds upon the work of a grant that he received in 2012 for a similar K-12 teacher seminar.
Myroslava Mudrak recently gave a lecture, ““Minsk, Maidan and MH17: Shadows of Forgotten Events in Ukraine,” at Lakeland Community College in November. She also wrote the chapter “Kazimir Malevich and the Liturgical Tradition of Eastern Christianity,” in Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity, edited by Rolan Betancourt and Maria Taroutina.
This spring, Mudrak gave the presentation “Averting a Crisis in Cubism: The Theoretical Writings of Alexis Gritchenko” at the Annual Meeting of the College Art Association in New York City. She also organized and moderated the symposium “Experiment, Expression, and the International Scene,” a symposium in conjunction with the exhibition “Staging the Ukrainian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s” at the Ukrainian Museum in New York City.
Andrea Sims published the book Inflectional Defectiveness with Cambridge University Press this fall.
Olli Tuovinen in November was appointed visiting professor at Tomsk State University for three years within the framework of the Academic D.I. Mendeleev Fund Program.
