Our efforts to promote communicative engagement continue within and outside of the university. To promote study of regional languages, REEES engagement coordinator Susan Dawkins and REEES faculty affiliate Olga Klimova visited area high school Russian classes to promote STARTALK and the Olympiada of Spoken Russian.  For high school students interested in a residential summer program for immersive Russian study, STARTALK applications will be available on our website soon.  Current high school Russian learners can participate in Olympiada on Saturday, March 28, 2020.

With other UCIS centers, our partnership with the Community College of Beaver County included participating in their inaugural International Day as well as helping to facilitate a faculty development workshop on internationalizing healthcare.  We look forward to hosting a group of students next month and sharing resources on globally themed programming and service opportunities. We have also participated in or co-sponsored several events, including the Polish Festival, the Pittsburgh Folk Festival Inaugural Nutroll Contest, and a tea and talk event hosted by the Yugoslav Room.  Please watch our weekly updates for news about the East European Festival coming up in September this year.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I was born and raised in the country of Georgia. I came to the United States many years ago. It's going to be 21 years in about a week. I got most of my education here in the United States, in New York City, where I did my master's degree at the City University of New York. Then I did my PhD in Ohio. I'm a visiting lecturer now here at the University of Pittsburgh in the Political Science Department teaching political science and enjoying it very much. So far, I'm a Pittsburgh resident.

What attracted you to study the politics of Georgia and the wider region?

Generally, I've always had an attraction to history and politics. My undergraduate degree in Georgia was a joint degree in history and political science, and I don't think I ever really wanted to do anything else except for maybe filmmaking, but that was out of reach for many years. Politics always interested me and taking into consideration the fact Georgian history and politics has been pretty dramatic. So that was pretty much the main trigger, which pushed me in that direction.

I was born in the Soviet Union in 1976. I witnessed Soviet Union in its last decades as a very young teenager. This cataclysmic upheaval occurred right in front of me. And Georgia ended under this rubble. That pretty much determined my focus not only on Georgia, but also the South Caucasus, Ukraine, Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe generally interests me a lot. I think the events which that unfolded dragged me in.

We rarely hear about the collapse of the Soviet Union from the periphery. How do you understand that experience from Georgia compared to how it's usually told?

There are two versions of the collapse of the Soviet Union. One is a Western version. The other is an insider version, so to speak. I think it was US Secretary of State James Baker who said that the Soviet Union went away with a whimper rather than a bang. I understand that's how it looked like from the West, but it was not peaceful at all. The lives of tens of millions of former Soviet citizens prove that the collapse of the Soviet Union was anything but peaceful. The collapse resulted in ethnic wars in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Central Asia, ethnic upheaval and the civil wars in Georgia and Tajikistan, political instability, and the entire debasement of the social classes which caused the massive migration. Georgia alone lost roughly about 1.8 million people. The Georgian population according to the Soviet census of 1989 was 5.5 million people. Right now, Georgia has somewhere between 3.5-3.7 million people. So, the loss was immense. The social and political dislocation was absolutely staggering, and it absolutely did not feel like a peaceful period. Even though Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the Soviet Union got the Nobel Peace Prize, citizens could not relate to any of that. It was very different on personal level and on societal level.

What does your academic work focus on and how does your personal experience inform it?

When I teach and do research, my personal stories are always there. I feel like I do a disservice to political science if they are not in my research and my teaching. Sometimes people’s stories actually make the better data for this kind of work. I would say the articles and books I write are the formalized theoretical version of my personal and political life.

My research is mostly focused on post-uprising regime stability. Why some regimes or why some governments lose power so quickly after the popular uprisings. For instance, my upcoming book currently under review by the University of Michigan Press is about why liberal regimes in post-Orange revolution Ukraine and post-Tulip Revolution Kyrgyzstan liberal regimes fell so quickly while the post-Rose Revolution Georgian regime lasted longer. I also focus on ethnic conflicts and state building generally. What factors strengthened and bolster the state and what prevents a stronger state from emerging.

Tell us about yourself.

I teach Russian literature at the University of Pittsburgh in the Slavic Languages and Literatures Department. I was born in Erevan, Armenia. My family emigrated from Armenia in the early nineties. I grew up in California and, I've been on the East Coast since the early 2000s.
 

What was it like growing up in the Armenian community in Los Angeles?

It's a very sizable community, and what’s really interesting about it is it's this meeting ground or a melting pot of different kinds of Armenians from all over—from Russia, Lebanon, Syria, and, Iran. It's interesting because there are cultural, historical, dialect differences. I think for an Armeniologist it's very interesting as this space where these distinct communities with their own histories and so forth come together and really mix quite a bit. In that respect, it's almost like an experiment.

How are the differences overcome within the Armenian community to create a shared Armenianess? I assume memory of the Armenian genocide plays an important role.

I think religion is usually given a certain preponderance because Armenia didn't have statehood from the 14th century until the early 20th century when it had independence for about two years. Then it was incorporated into the USSR, and now it's an independent republic. It's actually a really interesting question how has Armenianess persisted in the absence of a distinct polity that was nationally congruent with the group. I think religion has played an important role historically. Currently, you're probably right, and I would say unfortunately, the genocide has come to almost supplant all other aspects of Armenian culture in public discourse.

And I really don't much like that. I think it's too bad. I understand very well why that is. It is this defining moment for a lot of people for their national self-understanding and self-fashioning. But it’s actually a very sad state of affairs if you think about it because it's so prominent in Armenian public life and particularly in, I think, how the culture is viewed globally. It seems to me a kind of continuation of a trauma, if you will.

What got you interested in Russian literature?

I grew up fully bilingual and bicultural in every sense. I read Russian literature as a child of course, but as an area of serious study and a profession, Russian literature became interesting to me at Berkeley where I was an undergrad. I started out as an English major and then I took some, what I would call, gateway courses that were life-changing—truly—because here we are. In graduate school, I actually started out as a comparativist. I was going to do this project on the transnational flow of ideas around romantic nationalism on the one hand and then later socialism towards the end of the 19th century.

I was interested in which intellectual currents went through Transcaucasia. For example, it's interesting to look at where various 19th century Transcaucasian intellectuals were educated and trace those currents and to think about that space in a world literature context.

So, what happened?

What happened was I took my first course in 18th century Russian literature at Columbia and, I think, like a lot of grad students it was my first exposure to that time period. It was really compelling in some parts because it was also very new. Then going forward, I decided that I wanted a more holistic understanding of the Russian tradition because I realized that there were too many time periods that I was interested in to really do comparative literature.

Your most recent book is Noble Subjects: The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762-1861. How did you come to this topic?

This is my first book and it started out as my dissertation. When I began to work on the dissertation, the conceptual apparatus that I brought to 19th century Russian literature was very much shaped by the scholarship on French and English, and to a lesser degree American, 18th and 19th century literature. I was going to write a dissertation on domesticity, and it was going to culminate in the Russian realist novels rendering of home life. Which is to say that I came to Anna Karenina looking for Madame Bovary.

I was quickly prompted to reorient because as I began to read about domestic culture in Russia, and most of that reading was not literary but periodicals, domestic manuals, farming manuals, conduct books, and things like that. I came to see that domestic culture or housekeeping—in Russian it’s domovodstvo—had multiple meanings in Russian. So, if you want to figure out what domovodstvo is in the 1840s and you pick up the journal Notes of the Fatherland (Otechestvennye zapiski), which had a section called the domovodstvo, it's a lot of different things. It could be taking stains out of your nightgown or it could be farming manuals. It could be things about the three and seven field crop rotation system.

What was crucial, to my mind, was that women were at the forefront in the scholarship I had been reading that had to do mostly with middle-class and bourgeois 19th century domesticity. For example, the middle-class woman as political subject in English realist fiction. In the Russian case, it became apparent that this was not necessarily going to be the same. This is not to claim that men were exclusively associated with domovodstvo but they were strongly associated with it. And gradually I came to recalibrate the project around what I would call a masculine domestic ideology that still has a lot to do with Russian political culture and so forth. But you see how a project that started out with certain presumptions that were shaped through exposure to studies of Western societies got recalibrated to better fit what I was reading.

Nancy Condee (Slavic Language and Literatures, REEES) has been appointed by the Cambridge University Council of the Senate as an external member of the Board of Electors for Slavonic Studies.  The Board’s mission is to select the next Cambridge Chair of Slavonic Studies. Condee’s other professional activities include a consultancy for the University of Cincinnati (UC) Transnational Cultural Studies Group to explore the feasibility of a UC Title VI application for the next cycle; and an appointment to the Program Committee of the International Association for the Humanities (MAG), which will hold its upcoming Congress on 23-25 June 2020 in Belarus.  On 15 November, she participated in a roundtable for the annual Fall meeting of the journal boundary 2. 

Robert M. Hayden (Anthropology) delivered a keynote address entitled “Imagined Commemorations: EU Unremembering of the Great War, 2014,” at a conference on “Contested Memories in Southeast Europe 1912-2019: Examining Cycles of Conflict and Violence in Pre- and Post-war Eras,” University of Bern, 19 June 2019. In June, September and October, Hayden also engaged in extensive fieldwork in Bosnia-Herzegovina as part of his NSF-funded project on “(Re)Constructing Religioscapes as Competing Territorial Claims in Post-War Bosnia & Herzegovina,” with Professor Mario Katić (University of Zadar, Croatia).

Alissa Klots (History) took part in a round table on Inequality and Privilege under Socialism at the ASEEES Annual Convention in San Francisco. She also presented a paper "Babii Vek: Women Activists on "Aging and Womanhood" at a workshop "Aging and Gerontology after 1945: Situating the Soviet Case," hosted by Liverpool John Moores University. 

Since this year, Jan Musekamp is part of the research collaborative “Urban Authenticity: Creating, contesting, and visualizing the built heritage in European Cities since the 1970s” (2020-2022). Founding is provided by the Leibniz Association, a body of 96 independent German research institutions. Jan will collaborate with the Herder-Institute in Marburg/Germany and contribute with his own research on the Polish city of Szczecin. The project is looking for a PhD student/junior researcher to work on the topic “Urban Authenticity in Stettin/Szczecin”.

For more information on this three-year position in Germany please refer to: https://www.hsozkult.de/opportunity/id/stellen-19851 or ask Jan: jan.musekamp@pitt.edu

Posing these questions has become a regular part of the class spiel that I’ve been giving for the last two years as REEES’s “Water in Central Eurasia” Program Assistant. Along the way, I developed my own answers to these questions that have really informed my interests, shaping my experience at Pitt and ultimately my outlook as I plan on graduating in a few months.

I was first interested in the position because of the program’s regional approach to environmental issues. As an Urban Studies major, I spend a lot of time thinking about the processes that create urban systems, the resource demands that need met in cities (including water management), and the environmental and social consequences of development projects. When I began learning about the 3-course cluster, I couldn’t think of other initiatives on campus that were so specific, successfully delving into case studies in a relatively unknown part of the world while simultaneously questioning the normative assumptions that outsiders bring when thinking about other places.

In taking the “Past” (Empires and Environment in Central Eurasia) and the “Present” (Politics of Water in Central Eurasia) courses, I studied the ways in which water access embodied power, how science and engineering projects were politicized through knowledge production disputes, and how water management practices may create social implications for various levels of community. Alongside my time in the classes as well as promoting them, I further developed this understanding through coursework in urban studies. I became more and more exposed to the different ways to conceptualize the relationship between water, people, and societies through my major’s capstone paper as well as through archival research I completed through ULS and OUR Archival Scholars Research Award and through the Brackenridge Fellowship offered through the Honors College, under the direction of Dr. Michael Glass.

This fall, I had the opportunity to present the interdisciplinary approach taken in developing “Water in Central Eurasia” at the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education Conference in Spokane, Washington. I really value that I was able to speak to representatives of other universities who were also taking collaborative approaches to teaching water sustainability. I would like to thank the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation and REEES for the opportunity, as well as my colleagues from the Student Office of Sustainability for their support.

REEES students are working hard and making us proud. In addition to serving as Pitt’s first female drum major, senior Crissy Shannon has begun an internship in the PAGE (Partnership in Advancing Global Education) program, teaching Soviet history at Riverside High School. Karenna Oner and Eric Workman completed Critical Language Scholarships in Baku, Azerbaijan, where they are now continuing their study on Turkish on Boren Scholarships. Student preparations are well underway for the Washington DC Career Networking Trip in February and the Undergraduate Research Symposium in March. The leadership of the Graduate Organization for the Study of European and Central Asia (GOSECA)—including REEES graduate students Emi Finkelstein and Joe Patrick—is planning its annual conference in February on the topic of Borderlands. Karyn Bartosic continues as our undergraduate ambassador and leader of the revived REEES Student Club, while the Ukrainian Cultural Club, under the leadership of Marika Olijar, is organizing a Borscht Banquet and guest lectures on Ukrainian history. Former REEES ambassador Alexa Tignall has returned from her CLS-funded trip to Kyrgyzstan to enter Pitt Anthropology’s PhD program, and has been short-listed for the Fulbright to continue her studies of LGBT and women’s activism in Kyrgyzstan. Sebestyen Sandor won a scholarship from the Hungarian Nationality Room to research filmmaking in Budapest.

Hearty congratulations to the four students who graduated with REEES certificates in Fall 2019: Chloe Kay (GSPIA, Master of International Development), Adam Brode (History, PhD), Solo Bat-Erdene (Political Science, BA), and Madeline Kehl (Psychology, BA).