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Imperial Pasts in the Present: Affect, Indigeneity, and Memory

Part of the series Intersectionality in Focus: From Critical Pedagogies to Research Practice and Public Engagement in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Friday, October 29, 2021
2:00-3:30 PM
Off Campus Location
Moderator: Aslı Iğsız, associate professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, New York University. Presenters: Hakem Al-Rustom, Alex Manoogian Professor of Modern Armenian History and assistant professor of anthropology, University of Michigan; Vladislav Beronja, assistant professor of Slavic and Eurasian studies, University of Texas at Austin.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated pre-existing institutional, structural, and systemic discrimination and inequality in societies across the world. Furthermore, continued campaigns against gender and LGBTQ equity in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, racism in the United States, and the social protest movements that rose in response to such exclusionary projects have reinforced calls for intersectional approaches in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (SEEES). Class, ethnicity and race, dis/ability, gender and sexuality, and other identity markers interweave to produce inequality differently in Eastern Europe and Eurasia than in the Americas or Western Europe. Yet, it is these very differences that provide a rich ground for intellectual conversations in our field.

Aslı Iğsız is associate professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University. She earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Michigan. Professor Iğsız's book, Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange (Stanford University Press) uses the management of difference to explore racialized logics of population transfers, partitions, segregation, apartheid, and border walls. Her primary research interests are political violence, eugenics, humanism, spatial segregation, forced migration, and cultural policy. Prof. Iğsız is currently a fellow at the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton on a project that focuses on the notion of fascist utopias in the contemporary world.

Hakem Al-Rustom is the Alex Manoogian Professor of Modern Armenian History and assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. Professor Al-Rustom earned his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics in social anthropology. His main research interests are the anthropology of history, examining the relationships between indigenous populations and settler colonialists, migration and displacement, historical ethnographies, and silences and absences in post-Ottoman societies. Professor Al-Rustom is currently working on a book on the unwritten histories of the Armenian citizens of Turkey to depict the history of indigenous populations that continue to face erasures in the wake of the establishment of nation-states.

Vladislav Beronja is assistant professor of Slavic and Eurasian studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He received a Ph.D. in Slavic languages & literatures from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Professor Beronja's primary research interests range from contemporary comics and popular music to postmodern metafiction, psychoanalytical approaches to trauma, and Marxist aesthetics. He has published and edited many articles, book reviews, and translations. His current book project "Archival Fictions: Cultural Memory, Literary Imagination, and the Yugoslav Wars" examines how post-Yugoslav writers and artists critically deploy the archive as a governing metaphor for the loss and preservation of cultural memory in post-Communist Eastern Europe. Professor Beronja's courses highlight literature, cinema, music, and cultural identity in the Balkans; modern warfare and comics; and nostalgia and popular culture in Eastern Europe and the United States.

Register for the Zoom webinar at https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_9FNhcTJeSS-yzSAFewFLMg

If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us at crees@umich.edu. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.
Building: Off Campus Location
Location: Virtual
Website:
Event Type: Conference / Symposium
Tags: Diversity, European, Humanities, International, Russia, Social Sciences
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, International Institute, Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia

International Institute Programming

The International Institute’s centers sponsor numerous conferences, lectures, exhibits, and cultural performances throughout the year. These events are designed to educate the university community and the public about global issues and inspire discussion and dialogue. 

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