Events

Monday, September 11
Havighurst Center Colloquia Series: Writing from the Caucasus after Communism
Naomi Caffee, Reed College, Notes on the Russophone
Harrison Hall 210, 11:40am-1:00pm

Thursday, September 14 
Rima Praspaliauskiene, University of California, Berkeley
Enveloped Lives: Caring and Relating in Lithuanian Health Care
Upham Hall 255, 2:50-4:00pm

Wednesday, September 20
Havighurst Center Colloquia Series: Writing from the Caucasus after Communism
Margarit Ordukhanyan, translator 
Translating War Trauma: Polyphony and Silence in Narine Abgaryan’s Writing
Harrison Hall 210, 11:40am-1:00pm

Thursday/Friday, September 21-22 
Symposium on Exile
The Havighurst Center, together with the Humanities Center, is sponsoring a symposium on the topic of exile.  The symposium will concentrate on exile and displacement from the USSR and post-Soviet space. This focus is especially pertinent given the massive flow of Ukrainians into Europe (and beyond) due to Putin’s February 2022 invasion.

Panelists will discuss the history of the study of Russian emigration over the past century, taking 1922 as its point of departure and tracing it to the present. They will examine how the terms “émigré,” “displaced person,” “migrant,” “refugee” and others shape the identity of those crossing borders. Participants will represent Wesleyan University, University of Chicago, Hunter College, Columbia University, University of California, Berkeley, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Kansas, as well as Miami University and independent scholars.  
Richard and Carole Cocks Art Museum

Friday, September 22 
Annual Havighurst Lecture: Svitlana Tsikanouskaya, Belarus opposition leader
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya became the leader of the Belarusian democratic movement in 2020 and challenged the authoritarian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko in the presidential election held that year. When Lukashenko declared victory after widespread voter fraud, Tsikhanouskaya became the face of the protests that swept the country, the largest since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. She was forced into exile and now lives in Vilnius, Lithuania, where she heads the United Transition Cabinet, the decision-making unit for the democratic forces of Belarus.  Tsikhanouskaya's visit is co-sponsored by the Menard Family Center for Democracy.
Shideler Hall 152, 4:30pm

Wednesday, October 4
Film Screening of Eastern Front
“A gut-wrenching glimpse of the brutal realities of life and death on the Eastern front in Ukraine's fight to keep back Russian invaders. Among the early documentaries emerging from this brutal war, it is likely to stand the test of time.” —Modern Times Review
Harrison Hall 304, 5:00-7:00pm 

Thursday, October 5
Ilya Utekhin, Indiana University
Immortal Regiment and the memory of the 1990s in Russia
Upham Hall 235, 11:40am-1:00pm

Thursday, October 5
Sarah Phillips, Indiana University
Women with Disabilities, and Communities of Care in Wartime Ukraine
Upham Hall 255, 2:50-4:00pm 

Monday, October 9
Emily Channell-Justice, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University 
Ten Years After Euromaidan

In 2013, Fulbright scholar Emily Channell-Justice arrived in Kyiv to research student activism in Ukraine. Her planned project took a dramatic turn when the groups she was studying participated in the Euromaidan protests that broke out in November of that year. Channell-Justice was the only Western scholar embedded among the protestors; she took over 3000 photographs of the event. She donated those photos to King Library while she was a Teaching Fellow at Miami University through the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies. 

Channell-Justice, now Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukrainian Program at Harvard University's Ukrainian Research Institute, will return to campus to talk about the protests 10 years after they took place and to reflect on how the self-organization she observed in 2013 helps to explain Ukrainian reactions to the full-scale invasion launched by Russia in February 2022. We will also debut the website housing Channell-Justice's photographs.
King Library 320, 4:30pm

Monday, October 16
Togzhan Kassenova, Center for Policy Research, SUNY-Albany
Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave up the Bomb

Dr. Togzhan Kassenova is a Washington, DC-based senior fellow with the Project on International Security, Commerce, and Economic Statecraft (PISCES) at the Center for Policy Research, SUNY-Albany and a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is an expert on nuclear politics, WMD nonproliferation, strategic trade controls, sanctions implementation, and financial crime prevention.
Harrison Hall 111, 11:40am
co-sponsored with the Department of Political Science

Monday, October 23
Havighurst Center Colloquia Series: Writing from the Caucasus after Communism
Natalia Dudnik, George Mason University
Memory, Migration, and Subjectivity in the Works of Nino Haratischwili
Harrison Hall 210, 11:40am-1:00pm

Thursday, October 26
Annual Lithuania Program Lecture
Dr. Natalija Arlauskaite, Vilnius University; University of California, Berkeley
Lithuanian Documentary Animation: History, Gender, and Visual Documents of the Soviet

During the last two decades, family albums, pictures for documents, and personal and institutional photography archives of the Soviet period increasingly populated the cultural field in the Baltics and raised questions: What does it mean to look at these images and make them visible? What models for interpreting these visual documents are available? How do we manipulate them and what kind of "us" is created through these practices? Documentary animation brings its own angle - images of the past are moving in more than one sense.

Excerpts from the films of Giedre Benoriute, Deimantas Narkevicius, Vilma & Jurate Samulionyte, Gintare Valeviciute-Brazauskiene, Antanas Skucas, and other filmmakers will lead us into the discussion on how visual, primarily photographic, documents of the Soviet period are remediated in documentary animation and what kind of stories these films make visible.

Upham 255, 2:50-4:00pm  

Monday, October 30 (VIA Zoom)
Havighurst Center Colloquia Series: Writing from the Caucasus after Communism
Tamta Melashvili, Tbilisi State University
Women’s Voices in War Writing
Harrison Hall 210, 11:40am-1:00pm

Monday, November 13
Havighurst Center Colloquia Series: Writing from the Caucasus after Communism
Katherine Young, translator
Translating in the Post-Colonial Context: the Paradox of Azerbaijan’s Akram Aylisli
Harrison Hall 210, 11:40am-1:00pm