Events
The Havighurst Center hosts a number of events every semester, as well as acts as co-sponsor for events related to our focus organized by other departments and units. Please check back for changes, updates and additions.
Monday, September 15
Russia's War in Ukraine: Testimonies from the Occupied Regions
Neringa Klumbyte, Miami University
In 2022 Russia occupied large areas of Ukraine, where people experienced terror, violence, and multilayered insecurity. Based on testimonies collected in Ukraine, Lithuania, and the USA, Miami Anthropology Professor and Havighurst Center Faculty Associate Neringa Klumbytė will present the oral history project focused on de/occupied regions of Ukraine.
Harrison Hall 304, 4:30-5:30pm
Mondays, September 22-November 17
The Havighurst Center Colloquia Series (follow link for full schedule)
When the Bolshevik Party seized power in the former Russian Empire in October 1917, they instituted what one prominent historian has called a “propaganda state.” The propaganda system built by the Communist Party of the USSR – the Bolsheviks would rename themselves “Communists” in March 1918 – from its inception to its end in 1991. The Fall 2025 Havighurst Colloquium will welcome five prominent scholars to talk about various aspects of Soviet propaganda.
Benton Hall 115, 11:40am - 1:00pm
October 1 - November 21
Miami University Libraries Special Collections Exhibit: The Power of Propaganda
Celebrating 25 Years of collaboration between the Miami University Libraries and the Havighurst Center for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, this exhibit highlights items from the Havighurst Special Collections obtained through a longstanding partnership with the Havighurst Center for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies. “The Power of Propaganda” not only sheds light on how Soviet propagandists spread messages, but also how Soviet propaganda evolved over the course of the 20th Century.
Special Collections, King Library, 3rd Floor
Thursday, October 2
Ana Siljak, University of Florida, Starting Small: Nikolai Berdyaev and the Russian Philosophy of Personalism
In 1948 Time Magazine dubbed Berdyaev “one of the great religious philosophers of his time,” but Berdyaev is now rarely studied in the history of philosophy. Ana Siljak’s lecture covers her current project, which focuses on the recovery of the personalist thought of Nikolai Berdyaev and of the Russian personalism more broadly. Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, this project will center on the explication of his personalism, and it will also reveal the wide-ranging influence of his thought, not just in Europe, but around the world.
Upham Hall 365, 11:40am-1:00pm
Tuesday, October 14
Opening Reception for Special Collections Exhibit: The Power of Propaganda
Special Collections, King Library, 3rd Floor, 4:00pm
Thursday, October 16
Ben Nathans, University of Pennsylvania, 2025 Pulitzer Prize Winner, ‘To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause’: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, Benjamin Nathans's book tells the story of dissent in the USSR from Stalin's death to the collapse of communism, exploring the idea and practice of rights and the rule of law in the setting of “mature socialism.” Rather than treat Soviet dissidents as avatars of Western liberalism, or take their invocation of rights and legal norms as natural, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause investigates how, as products themselves of the Soviet order, dissidents arrived at a conception of law and human personality so at odds with official norms.
Understanding this process - how orthodoxies contain the seeds of their own heresies, and how dissidents promoted the containment of Soviet power from within - promises to illuminate the broader problem of how citizens of authoritarian societies conceive and act on options for political engagement. There will be a book sale and signing at the event.
Harrison Hall 204, 4:30-5:45pm
Saturday, October 18
The Centenary of Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow: His Legacy for America, Russia, and Ukraine.
A Symposium
Harrison Hall 204, 10:00am-4:00pm
Monday, November 3
Vitaly Komar, artist
Lessons from History
Vitaly Komar is one-half of the duo Komar and Melamid, artists who founded the sots-art movement in the Soviet Union before emigrating to Israel in 1977 and then the United States in 1978. Their work, as a recent retrospective exhibit declared, "was born of a negation of the Soviet idiosyncrasies, senseless propaganda, and numbing rituals of the 1960s and 1970s, but also of a collective trauma from Stalin's terror." The art movement they established -- sots-art -- reacted to the ubiquitous propaganda and ideological slogans in the USSR. Inspired in part of the American pop art of Andy Warhol (when the duo moved to the United States, they officially purchased Warhol's soul), sots-art aimed to combine the two realities of life in the USSR, official and private.
Vitaly Komar will talk about his life and his art. The event takes its name from the recent retrospective held at the Zimmerli Art Museum. As Komar stated in response to his artwork engaging with history and historical figures such as Stalin: "History teaches us no aesthetic lessons. But maybe art can teach historical lessons.”
Richard and Carole Cox Art Museum, 4:30pm
Wednesday, November 5
Samizdat Workshop
When Soviet dissidents wanted to document the truth about the system -- and to counter Soviet propaganda -- they primarily did so through samizdat ("self-publishing"). Soviet dissidents typed up news stories and re-typed or copied banned literature and then passed it on. The most important samizdat publication was the Chronicle of Current Events, which documented human rights violations in the USSR, unjust trials, and political persecutions. In this workshop, participants can use typewriters to type out news stories, poems, and more just like Soviet dissidents did. A prize will be awarded for the best publication.
King Library 320 and Makerspace, 11:30am-1:30pm
Monday, November 10
Annual Havighurst Center Lecture: Andrey Kurkov
Ukraine's most celebrated novelist, Andrey Kurkov was a journalist, prison warder, cameraman and screenplay writer before becoming a novelist. His books include the 2024 International Booker Prize-longlisted The Silver Bone, the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Grey Bees, and the international bestseller Death and the Penguin.
As well as writing fiction for adults and children, Kurkov has become known as a commentator and journalist on Ukraine for the international media. His work of reportage, Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, was published in 2014. He has recently published two volumes of his ongoing diary about the Russian invasion of Ukraine: Diary of an Invasion (Deep Vellum, 2023) and Our Daily War (Open Borders Press, 2025).
McGuffy Hall 322, 4:30-5:45 PM
Tuesday, November 11
Andrey Kurkov, in Conversation with Stephen Norris
Join us for a thought-provoking conversation between Ukrainian author and public intellectual, Andrey Kurkov and Dr. Stephen Norris, Director of Havighurst Center for East European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at Miami University. Kurkov is the author of 19 novels and over 20 documentaries and TV movie scripts. Book sale and signing to follow.
Oxford Lane Library, 441 S. Locust St., Oxford, Ohio
Havighurst Room, 6:30-8:00
