Thursday, July 18, 2024
2024 ASEEES Dissertation Research and Summer Writing Grantees Announced
In 2024, ASEEES awarded 10 dissertation research grants and 6 summer writing grants to graduate students in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies, supporting interdisciplinary research on diverse subjects ranging from public memory in post-war Bosnia and conspiracy theories in Russian political discourse to domestic violence law in twenty-first century Armenia and how hunting informed narratives of power in nineteenth-century Central Asia. Read about the grantees and their research below!
Donate today to support doctoral research and strengthen the field!
2024 Priority Funds
2024 Dissertation Research Grant Recipients
Yasyn Abdullaev, History, University of California, Berkeley
“Destructive Doctrines: Conspiracy Mythology and the Rise of Modern Politics in Russia, 1789-1848”
My dissertation, “Destructive Doctrines,” surveys the rise of conspiracy thinking in Russia at the turn of the nineteenth century and its impact on the country’s political culture and state-building. How did conspiracy theories evolve over time in Russia? What was the influence of anti-Western conspiracy theories on Russian politics? How did conspiracism determine the formation of the modern state in the tsarist empire? To answer these questions, I focus on the myth of conspiracy by secret societies, a powerful metanarrative concerning the plot of the Freemasons and Illuminati against the monarchy, Christianity, and aristocratic society that shaped the political consciousness of the European educated class during the Age of Revolution. My dissertation will demonstrate how the Franco-German conspiracy theories about the existential threat of secret societies were imported to Russia from the West after 1789 and how they proliferated there and became so deeply entrenched in the imagination of the governing elites within the Russian autocratic political tradition. The primary focus of the study is to reveal the ways in which the culture of conspiracy theorizing molded the development of state institutions in the Russian Empire and affected such areas of modern politics as ideology and the security apparatus (including its transnational dimension). This research will further our understanding of the phenomenon of conspiracism by reconstructing the story of its origins in Russia and identifying the historical causes for the overwhelming success of conspiracy theories in the Russian political discourse and national consciousness. Moreover, in this dissertation, I will put conspiracy thinking into the broader conversation on state formation and the emergence of governmental politics in nineteenth-century Europe, foregrounding the relevance of specific ideologies and national and political myths in this process.
Benjamin Arenstein, Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago
“Underground Literature and the Remaking of Jewish Culture in the Late Soviet Union”
This dissertation explores the role of underground literature in shaping Soviet Jewish culture between 1953-1989. By close reading Jewish underground journals alongside personal correspondence, interviews, and the archives of Soviet literary institutions, I investigate how Jews living under late socialism employed underground literature to reconceptualize their notion of Jewish culture after decades of assimilation into the Russian and Soviet cultural spheres. Which texts and literary genealogies did Jews in the late Soviet Union draw on to produce an understanding of Jewish culture? What was the relationship between how Jewish culture was conceptualized in underground literary publications and the notion of Jewish culture presented in the official publication sphere? In what ways did underground literature and its cultural project serve to probe the bounds of Soviet Jewish subjectivity under late socialism? What Jewish culture was and what it meant to late-Soviet Jews was not articulated uniformly throughout the USSR. Accordingly, my project adopts a broad geographic scope. It focuses on multilingual Jewish communities in Latvia, Georgia, and Tajikistan, in addition to those primarily Russophone communities in Moscow and Leningrad. By excavating the geographically varied and linguistically diverse visions of Jewish culture articulated in underground texts, my research seeks to refine our understanding of the place that Jews occupied in the wider culture of the late Soviet Union, as well as the nature of Soviet underground and Russophone literature more broadly.
Alexandra Artamonova, Art History, Northwestern University
“The Art of Socialist ‘Friendship’ during the Cold War: Black Artists’ Encounters with the Eastern Bloc, 1950 to 1979”
“The Art of Socialist ‘Friendship’ during the Cold War” investigates the aesthetic forms and artistic practices developed by Black artists who were involved in socialist “friendship” to argue that these artists developed a revolutionary aesthetic at the intersection of two projects: the geopolitical project of antiracist and anticolonial socialist “friendship” and the antiformalist project of post-war Socialist Realist art practices that rejected the modernist or “formalist” practices of Western art. At the same time, this project reveals a contradiction at the heart of socialist cultural internationalism: as the Eastern Bloc aimed to instruct African students on the principles of socialist art and Socialist Realism, these two concepts were in theoretical crisis and undergoing internal reformation. This reformation problematizes the clear-cut division between post-war Socialist Realism and Western modernism by revealing the reintroduction of modernist elements and genres into the late art system of the Eastern Bloc and the pivotal role that Black artists played in this process. This study shows that these artists not only reinterpreted and repurposed the principles of two aesthetic systems, but also directly impacted them.
Ozlem Eren, Art History, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Decentralizing the Architecture of Rus’”
Joseph Bradley and Christine Ruane Research Grant in Russian Studies
My dissertation explains the origins and significance of the distinctive church architecture that flourished in the Vladimir-Suzdal Principality in the twelfth century. My primary case study is the St. Demetrios Cathedral, ca. 1193-1197, in Vladimir. The architectural style in Vladimir-Suzdal, characterized by its use of white-stone materials, long drums, and carved reliefs on all façades, differs from the predominantly Byzantine style found in Kyiv. It appears to be an exception within the land of Rus’ and within the context of Byzantine and Balkan Orthodox or the Western (Romanesque) religious architecture. Thus, a wider framework beyond the “Byzantine versus Romanesque influence” debate is required. My dissertation tests the hypothesis that Northeast Rus’ (Vladimir-Suzdal) and Southwest Rus’ (Galicia-Volhynia) had developed under quite different artistic currents, namely, Eastern (Georgian, Armenian) and Western (Romanesque), while being under a predominantly Byzantine cultural umbrella. My proposed solution toward a greater understanding of the origins and reasons of the appearance of this new sculptural style lies in a re-evaluation of our understanding of the term “Rus’.” Russian chronicles suggest that “Land of Rus’” did not imply a unified state but indicated individual Rus’ principalities. Thus, my dissertation contributes to the dismantling of the Russian imperialist theory of the unbroken continuity of Kyivan heritage from Kyiv to Moscow by showing the diverse architectural developments in Galicia-Volhynia through its interactions with Western medieval kingdoms, quite differently from the Northeastern Rus’ principalities.
Sooyeon Lee, Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto
“Cultural Dialogues and Echoes Represented in the Translations of Soviet and North Korean Children’s Folktales”
James Bailey Dissertation Research Grant in Folklore Studies
North Korea’s integration into the socialist bloc in the mid-1950s is commonly perceived as a product of the Soviet Union’s support. With the framework that reads their relationship as one-sided—the Soviet Union aids and North Korea receives—extant research has heavily focused on North Korea’s literary activities and output as being an imitation of Soviet Stalinist models, and in turn having had little influence on the Soviet Union. Such historical reading persists in the context of children’s literature, despite its important role in shaping both countries’ political and ideological discourses. However, a closer examination reveals reciprocal translation practices that undergirded both countries’ pursuit of divergent and specific objectives as they took shape within the context of importation and publication of each other’s literature. My research highlights the ways in which translated literary texts, especially within children’s literature and folkloric texts, created space for dynamic exchange and discursive re-imagining of both nation’s statehood and their respective political and ideological goals.
Yana Lysenko, Comparative Literature, New York University
“Odesa’s Many Identities: From the Politics of Russianness to the True Ukrainian City”
Dissertation Research Grant in Ukrainian Studies
My dissertation examines the ways that city residents constitute and reconstitute ideas of their own urban identity in the Ukrainian city of Odesa. Long mythologized as an important city across different ethnic and national imaginaries (Ukrainian, Jewish, and Russian, among others), Odesa historically preferred to think of itself as a separate cultural entity within a localized sphere, rather than categorizing itself within a broader concept of nation-state or imperial identity. As a port city on the geographical margins of empire, far from the imperial cores of spaces like Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Odesa benefitted from ethnic, linguistic, and social diversity, although always within (and even because of) proximity to Russianness, frequently known even today as a “Russian-speaking city.” Defining this as the “politics of Russianness,” I argue that this proximity to Russian language and culture served as a means of maintaining autonomy and broader freedom within a context of oppression of non-Russian national identities and enforced Russification throughout the Soviet era and until Ukrainian independence. I thus interrogate the ways in which Odesans continuously defined and redefined themselves within literature, cinema, and various forms of media as a means of adapting to the tumultuous conditions the city found itself in within the 20th and 21st centuries. This includes looking at Odesa’s famous reputation as the city of humor, and the influence of the city’s public spaces (i.e., the Odesan courtyard apartments) not only on its self-definition, but on the rise of a genre I call “Odesan nostalgia” in post-independence Ukraine. The dissertation also interrogates broader cultural and political issues provoked by the Russo-Ukrainian War and the full-scale invasion, looking at contemporary Odesan poet Boris Khersonsky’s Russophone poetry as a theoretical base for understanding modes of resistance in speaking the colonizer’s tongue and the politics of self-translation, as Khersonsky began to publish in Ukrainian following 2014. I also examine wartime digital media as an important factor in Odesa’s active immersion into (and embrace of) Ukrainian national identity, no matter its language or history.
Charis Marantzidou, History, Columbia University
“From Slavic Brothers to Socialist Comrades: The Russian Emigration in Bulgaria, 1918-1954″
My dissertation explores the evolution of the Russian diaspora in Bulgaria from the period following the 1917 revolution to the spread of communism in Eastern Europe after World War II. During this time, Bulgaria became a hub for interactions among Russian refugees, Soviet state actors, Bulgarian political groups, and international organizations. The dissertation argues that the Russian emigration, rather than looking to the past, took shape through a dynamic, triangular relationship with the Soviet Union and Bulgaria—one that incorporated regional legacies of the Russian Empire, international responses to Bolshevism, and the everyday, local experiences of refugees. In the aftermath of the Russian Civil War, Bulgaria functioned almost as an extension of the front, with camps full of demobilized soldiers and refugees sparking international debates and domestic political conflicts about their status and treatment. As Russians integrated with Bulgarian society, some contributed expertise to state initiatives, formed diasporic institutions, or engaged in anti-communist activities. However, after the arrival of the Red Army in 1944, a community of Soviet citizens emerged from the remnants of an emigration that once saw itself as representative of imperial Russia.
Helena Ratte, Anthropology, University of Chicago
“Women, War and Peace: NGO Politics and Internationalism after Socialism”
Dissertation Research Grant in Women and Gender Studies
My planned dissertation explores the paradoxes and frictions of a transnational movement for women’s rights in and after conflict through an ethnographic study of NGO in and beyond Southeast Europe. Conscripts of a global movement for women’s rights in and after conflict, Bosnian and Serbian activists find space to maneuver in this movement’s interstices, engaging archives of Yugoslav feminist internationalism and nonalignment imaginatively and practically in their work. I examine how Women Peace and Security (WPS) organizes channels of cooperation and exchange between ex-Yugoslav feminists and activists in other “conflict-affected” countries worldwide in relation to forms of solidarity that predate them. Tracing evolving conversations between global partners, I ask: how does contemporary transnational movement building structured in a liberal humanitarian idiom serve as a site of encounters that resonate historically—an umbrella under which individuals find cover to pursue a variety of political projects? How does the construal of likeness serve as actionable grounds for transnational solidarity? When and to what strategic ends do activists engage in a politics of anachronism? Finally, how do projects of international movement-building reposition polities and people in a shifting 21st-century global political geography?
Viktoriia Savchuk, Communication, University of Maryland, College Park
“Ukraine’s Nation-Branding in Response to Russia’s War”
My dissertation aims to examine how Ukraine utilizes nation branding in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion, particularly from the perspective of public relations. Notably, Ukraine was the first country to employ nation branding as a tool of warfare, challenging our understanding of the field and requiring further investigation. Additionally, this research project aims to bridge the fields of Ukrainian studies, nation branding, and public relations. While Ukraine has gained more recent attention from scholars due to its tragic circumstances, there is still a need for more comprehensive research, which my dissertation can provide.
Temirlan Tileubek, History, University of California, Davis
“The Nature of Russian Imperial Rule in Central Asia”
Maya K. Peterson Research Grant in Environmental Studies
“The Nature of Russian Imperial Rule in Central Asia” deals with the environmental history of Central Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This project started last year as a paper that focused on the history of hunting and animal conservation in Central Asia. I examined both direct and metanarrative projections of power through the study of hunting journals and actions of Russian imperial hunting societies. By emphasizing the superiority of Russian weaponry and technology and underlining the inferiority of native hunting methods and “helplessness” of native inhabitants, Russian officer-hunters claimed to protect Central Asians from constant terrors and attacks of wild animals, such as tigers and wild boars. The articles from hunting journals juxtaposed the manliness and military prowess of Russian hunters against the passivity and defenselessness of native inhabitants. On top of that, by forming local hunting societies, Russian hunters tried to implement hunting regulations, which would conserve local animals and limit other people’s access to hunting (especially “ruthless” native inhabitants’). These multi-layered projections of power underlined the “inferiority” of the Central Asian population and provided a leverage through which to exert imperial control over the natural resources of Central Asia. However, these projections of power were not always uncontested and native inhabitants constantly disrupted the attempts of Russian hunters to “rationally” supervise hunting. Moreover, native hunting methods, while lacking in their technological aspect, were not less efficient as Russian. The regulation of hunting and formation of hunting societies were just one of the venues through which imperial officials, settlers, and native inhabitants interacted in colonial Central Asia. I will build on these findings and expand the scope of my research to include larger natural elements, such as forests and water bodies, in order to understand how imperial administration tried to manage and control nature and with it, Central Asians.
2024 Summer Dissertation Writing Grant Recipients
Fiona Bell, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale University
“Russian Forms: Race, Sex, and the Making of Russian Literature”
My dissertation retells Russian literary history as the continual rearticulation of “Russian” as a racial category. Beginning with the global debates on the abolition of slavery of serfdom in the 1850s, I explore the ways in which canonical Russian writers—Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Shklovskii, and others—write fiction about kinship and sexuality that, in turn, articulates Russian whiteness, non-whiteness, or mixed race status at key historical junctures, from the Great Reforms to the October Revolution and the first wave of emigration. By rereading Russian literary history with the disciplinary formations of gender and sexuality studies and race and ethnicity studies, I show how the elaboration of Russian racial imaginaries was coterminous with the construction of the Russian literary canon and literary theory. Oriented to the field of Russian literary studies, Russian Forms also represents a new contribution to race and ethnicity studies and gender and sexuality studies, introducing “Russianness,” and the literature that produced this concept, as an important and undertheorized category in the global history of sexuality and racial formations.
Zachary Hicks, Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Berkeley
“The Long Contemporary: Timelessness, Empire, and Aesthetic Politics in Russophone Cultural Production, 1970-2014″
My dissertation examines the works of literary authors, filmmakers, and visual artists in the Soviet and post-Soviet world who grappled with the problem of temporality when state socialism was coming to an end and as a new world was being constructed. Attending to the close affinity between the commodity form and form as an aesthetic category, I weave together historically situated close readings of cultural texts with a narrative of political economic transformation that takes us through the sudden eclipsing of a developmentalist, “Three Worlds” model of culture—within which the Soviet Union is rapidly converted from a potential alternative center to that of the West into a set of fifteen ‘developing nations’—and its replacement by a single, globalized contemporaneity. I argue that aesthetic form and its mobilization in late- and post-Soviet cultural production disrupts and complicates our thinking about time, history, and globality. The story told is not one of the former Second World’s inevitable homogenization under the sign of globalization, but rather of the production of difference as the region’s reincorporation into global capital also grounds its historical non-synchronicity.
Olivia Kennison, Slavic Studies, Brown University
“’О новом значении древней трагедии’: Translation and Reception of Greek Tragedy in the Russian Silver Age”
My dissertation will discuss the reception of Greek tragedy during the Silver Age of Russian literature. Literature from antiquity has been influential in the development of Russian literature from the eighteenth century onwards, but Russia’s reception of classical heritage was primarily mediated through its contact with European culture. Catherine the Great attempted to combat this situation by adding Ancient Greek and Latin to gymnasium curriculums, aiming to perpetuate the idea that Russia was related organically to Ancient Greece through their Slavic ancestor and Byzantium. This idea is present in the poetry of the Russian Romantics and emerged again in the literature and art of the Silver Age. The invented relationship between Ancient Greece and Russia, meant to evoke a mystical connection between the ancient and modern, is an example of a recurring problem in the reception of the antique in Russia: it is perpetually contaminated by other dominating frameworks which steer interpretation as well as translation. In the context of the reception of tragedy in the Silver Age, the key frameworks were Friedrich Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy,” as well as the aesthetics of medieval Christianity, which continued from the Romantic tradition. This dissertation will explore how Silver Age writers were influenced by these forces, and how that is expressed in their translations, theoretical writings, and receptions.
Lori Pirinjian, Near Eastern Languages & Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles
“An Analysis of the Domestic Violence Law in Post-Soviet Armenia”
This dissertation project focuses on the process of passing the domestic violence law in the Republic of Armenia over the period of 2013 to 2017 within the context of the political rivalry between the European Union and the Russian Federation. It will study how each of these entities seeks to exert regional power over Armenia. The introduction of this law in Armenia marked a new phase in the post-Soviet cycle of European initiatives followed by Russian backlash in this country. The EU seeks to affiliate Armenia’s political values with its own, focusing on individual rights, autonomy, and rule of law, while Russia seeks to prolong Armenia’s association with a continued focus on group rights over those of the individual. By combining theories from legal anthropology and gender studies, the goal of this dissertation is to identify the mechanisms and practices through which the EU and Russia promote their ideological agendas.
Anna Smelova, History, Georgetown University
“Imagining Indigenous Siberia: Populist Ethnography of Northeast Asia Under Russian Late Imperial and Early Soviet Regimes”
“Imagining Indigenous Siberia” interrogates the state of Siberian ethnography at the turn of the 20th century, focusing on the role of revolutionary intellectuals in accumulating knowledge and shaping nationalities policy toward ethnic minorities under the late imperial and early Soviet regimes. Performing as reluctant Kulturträger, populists-turned-ethnographers approached indigenous peoples, much like they did with peasants and workers—with a mix of admiration and patronization—aiming to lead them to “enlightenment” and revolution. This interdisciplinary project intersects the history of science, anthropology, and cultural and gender studies to examine the political activities and Weltanschauung of the 1880s cohort of exiled revolutionaries-turned-ethnographers (former Zemlevoltsy and Narodovoltsy), including Vladimir Bogoras, Vladimir Jochelson, Lev Shternberg, Moisei Krol’, Nikolai Vitashevskii, and others. By constructing the first prosopographical portrait of their generational cohort, my dissertation analyzes the radical ethnographers’ “conceptual conquest” of northeast Asia, specifically focusing on the region of the present-day Republic of Sakha-Yakutia.
Merima Tricic, Urban Planning and Public Policy, University of California, Irvine
“A War of Words: Activist Narratives of Sexual Violence and Contested Public Memories of Space in Post-War Bosnia”
This dissertation’s main research question broadly inquires: how do activists and policymakers use narrative and embodied performance to construct and submerge public memories of sexual violence? It focuses on the following three key themes that emerge from the process of constructing and challenging public memories surrounding sexual violence. First, I examine the role of narratives and narrative framing in peacebuilding activism. I examine how narrative framing is used to mobilize groups about traumatic wartime memories and encourage other civilians to participate by establishing diverse activist frames that they can relate to. Second, I examine the role of embodied narratives, or how individuals make sense of their everyday lives through felt experiences and emotions that are situated from moment to moment within and across time and space. I investigate the embodied nature of narrative to understand the role of narrative in healing and the experience of policy conflict. Third, I examine the theme of narratives in relation to mobilization over space and the complex collective identity interest formation between invented and invited spaces created by survivor activists. I focus on performed narratives and examine how they relate to spaces’ empowering (or disempowering) nature. This dissertation can have important implications for understanding the complexity of peace, healing, and justice in post-war societies for unresolved grievances in specific populations. It explores the problematizations of “peace” for survivors in Bosnia and helps define how peace is conceptualized, challenged, and redefined by some activists in organizations serving sexual violence survivors. This research has implications for understanding the barriers activists face in telling narratives and the complexities involved in when and how narratives are told to frame reparations issues in post-conflict peacebuilding. This research could also provide insights into the barriers in storytelling about social transformation and the complexities that activists face in countering official approaches to storytelling.