Junior Scholar Workshop in Russian and East European Jewish Cultures

About

The Working Group in Russian and East European Jewish Cultures at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign invite submissions for a Junior Scholar Workshop in Russian and East European Jewish Cultures, to be held via Zoom on May 24 and May 25, 2021. The workshop is open to advanced graduate students and early career scholars (up to five years after the Ph.D.). Abstracts and papers should highlight the critical methodologies used in the work. Selected papers will be pre-circulated among the participants, to maximize the opportunity for discussion. Note that circulation-ready papers will be due April 26.

Participants will also have an opportunity to meet with a panel of invited archivists and reference librarians in the field of Jewish and Slavic Studies.

Project Leaders

Eugene M. Avrutin

Eugene M. Avrutin is the Tobor Family Endowed Professor of Modern European Jewish History at the University of Illinois. He is the author and co-editor of seven books, including Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia (Cornell University Press, 2010) and Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond: New Histories of an Old Accusation (Indiana University Press, 2017). The Velizh Affair: Blood Libel in a Russian Town was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. He is at work on several projects: a short exploration of racial politics in modern Russia, and a longer book on crime, criminality, and neighborly relations.

Contact: eavrutin@illinois.edu

Harriet Lisa Murav

Harriet Murav is the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies and a Center for Advanced Study Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and in the Program in Comparative and World Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the editor of Slavic Review. The author of Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels & the Poetics of Cultural Critique (1992), Russia's Legal Fictions (1998); Identity Theft: The Jew in Imperial Russia and the Case of Avraam Uri Kovner ( 2003); Music From a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia (2011), and David Bergelson’s Strange New World: Untimeliness and Futurity (2019). She is the co-translator, with Sasha Senderovich, of David Bergelson’s Judgment (2017), and has a new translation project with Senderovich: In the Shadow of the War: Russian Jewish Writers after the Holocaust. Murav is also completing Hefker: The Literature of Abandonment and the Russian Civil War, a study of literary and documentary responses to the pogroms of 1919-1922.

Contact: hlmurav@illinois.edu

Keely Stauter-Halsted

Keely Stauter-Halsted is Professor of History and Hejna Family Chair in the History of Poland at the University of Illinois in Chicago, where she serves as Director of Graduate Studies and co-directs programming in Polish Studies. Her teaching and research examine issues of ethnicity, gender, and class in East Central Europe. Stauter-Halsted has published on topics ranging from peasant nationalism to Polish-Jewish relations, prostitution and human trafficking. Her first monograph, The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland (Cornell University Press, 2001) won the Orbis Prize in Polish history. Her second book, The Devil’s Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland (Cornell University Press, 2015) received the American Historical Association Joan Kelly Prize and the Association for Women in Slavic History Heldt Prize, among others. Stauter-Halsted’s recent work investigates refugees and forced migration in the Polish Second Republic immediately following World War I.

Karen Underhill

Karen Underhill is Associate Professor of Polish Literature and Polish Jewish Studies in the Department of Polish, Russian & Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research at the intersection of Polish and Jewish cultures and literatures focuses on Polish and Yiddish modernisms, Galician Jewish culture in the interwar period, and Poland as a multilingual and pluralist space of encounter. Her book Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity is forthcoming from Indiana University Press. Her current research explores changing narratives of Poland’s Jewish past, and modern literary forms that arise at the intersection of theology and materialism: "writing in the third language". She is an educational program consultant for the Taube Foundation for the Revival of Jewish Life in Poland, and co-founder of Massolit Books and Café in Krakow.

Marina Mogilner

Marina Mogilner is Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA, where she holds the Edward and Marianna Thaden Chair in Russian and East European Intellectual History. She is also a co-founder and co-editor of the Ab Imperio quarterly. Mogilner is the author of multiple articles and chapters exploring the politics of knowledge in the Russian Empire, including Russian Jewish medical and anthropological discourses. Her most recent book, Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia(2013), offers a history of race science in the Russian Empire and early USSR. She is currently completing a book on Jewish self-racializing: A Race for the Future: Scientific Visions of Modern Russian Jewishness (1860s–1930s).

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