July 2025
Call for Abstracts: The Life and Death of Cold War Funding
Special Issue of The Russian Review
From Fulbright and IREX scholarships facilitating in-country immersion, to the Wilson Center’s efforts to connect academics and policymakers, to Title VI and Title VIII support for less commonly taught “critical” languages, funding programs that began in the Cold War shaped the field of Russian and Eastern European studies in enduring ways. These programs not only helped the US government “know its enemy” but also consolidated and institutionalized new fields of knowledge (“area studies”), trained experts in the United States, and developed a network of content-creators in the region. Despite its ideological partiality, this system of knowledge production helped soften hearts and minds on both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain. Though the original political impetus behind these programs ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, many initiatives survived. Even after the Cold War they funded the continued creation of cross-cultural knowledge and expertise, training the next generation of American scholars, and bringing academics, writers, and other practitioners from the region to the West.
Meanwhile, post-Soviet states went on to develop their own responses to these programs, from the Higher School of Economics’ postdoctoral fellowships and conferences in Russia to Kazakhstan’s Boloshak international scholarships. Recent years also witnessed the passage of “foreign agent” laws seeking to track, target, and restrict US-based funding.
As funding opportunities that began in the Cold War end and the institutions they created face closure, potentially for good, this special issue of The Russian Review invites contributions reflecting on the life and death of Cold War-era funding, and how this funding shaped the Cold War and its aftermath. Contributions should examine the creation and operation of these programs in the broader story of soft power, cultural exchange, international relations, institutions, and transnational history and politics. Contributors might also address the question of what will fill the vacuum created by the potential demise of US-led programs.
The journal will consider two types of proposals for this special issue: 1) proposals for academic articles based on original research of approximately 9,000 words; and 2) proposals for personal reflections of up to 4,000 words and/or video essays.
Please submit a brief abstract (250-300 words) detailing your proposed contribution and clearly indicating the proposal type (academic article, personal reflection, video essay) to Managing Editor Kurt Schultz (rusrev@ku.edu) by July 1, 2025. For accepted proposals, complete submissions will be due by November 1, 2025. Submissions will then go through an anonymized peer review process, with the special issue’s publication planned for 2026.
The Black Sea as a Literary and Cultural Space (3)
Ruins (Ancient and Modern) and Mobilities
20-22 November 2025
Ovidius University of Constanţa (Romania)
Call for papers
Co-organisers:
· Faculty of Letters, Ovidius University of Constanta
· Institute of Comparative Literature at Ilia State University (Tbilisi, Georgia)
· CIELAM (Centre Interdisciplinaire d’Étude des Littératures d’Aix-Marseille) of Aix-Marseille University (France)
· Sextil Puşcariu Institute of Romanian Academy (Cluj-Napoca)
· Institute for Literature at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Sofia)
· Association “Transpontica” (Sofia)
· Department of Romance Studies at Sofia University
With the support of the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie
Argument
Ruins are inseparable from habitats from (types of) experiencing a territory (and aquatory). Ruins mark the outer edges and midpoints of habitats brought about by rivers, wells, ponds, limans, peninsulas and coastal mountain ranges (on the one hand) and a wilderness beyond, on land and at sea alike (on the other hand). May they anchor discourses that are neither elegiac nor apocalyptic but re-domesticating? Or re-domestication takes place as a tacit (extra-literary) activity only? Where is the boundary between re-domestication and oblivion?
Ovidiac self-extolment (cf. McGowan 2009: 86, 166) at a conceived endpoint (cf. Knox, ed., 2009: 179, 459-461; “A deep poetic tradition linked the Black Sea passages to the world beyond and the ultimate limit traced by Okeanos.” (Gagné 2021: 243)), Ecclesiast-like aloofness from any point (as implied by the exo-pictogramme of the region as a Scythian bow, cf. Dan 2013), and Mithridatic migration/oscillation between relatively modest mid-points (“Regal authority was not focused in one place but distributed between a number of royal residences […]”, Mitchel 2002: 59) seem to be three powerful cultural archetypes in the area.
The archetype of self-extolment at a threshold has been replayed in numerous literary works, some or even many of which mirrored, that is, repeated-on-the-reverse, the becoming of the Ovidiac habitus: writers from the ‘barbaric’ hinterland came up to the enormous ‘window’/‘door’ of the seashore. Aloofness seems to have been recalled very rarely; landmark pieces of Bulgarian modernist and of Georgian postmodernist literature, On the Isle of the Blessed by Pencho Slaveikov and Santa Esperansa by Aka Morchiladze, which already started receiving attention from Anglophone scholarship, seem to revive it. May we pay more attention to the third one?
Seasonal movements between a(n inland) city, a maritime resort, a mountain or recreational inland resort, and a hinterland village linking to ancestors and to a plot for agricultural activity (half-leisure, half-out-of-economic-necessity) may be considered a late twentieth-century variant of the mentioned ‘Mithridatic’ oscillation. Despite that their internal logic seems to be the change of type of (micro)habitat (along two axes: urbanised – rural, and mountain – plain – sea), and not the monitoring of, or re-asserting a sovereignty over, a territory or macro-habitat. They characterised the life of many anonymous citizens of countries under accelerated modernisation like Bulgaria, Romania and Soviet Georgia, but also of famous writers – like Andrei Belyi of his late years, for example (see Magarotto 1985: 388-391; Frison 2021).
May ruins have been a focal point for individuals from both groups (destined-to-remain-anonymous and destined-to-become-famous, ‘consumers’ and ‘(re)creators’) beyond sightseeing and beyond individual(ist) mythologies of artists? May we go beyond the seemingly improvised pairing of royal mobility in the Kingdom of Pontos with the elites and non-elites of the late modern period? Is transhumance (seasonal movement of pastoralists with their livestock) the only form of mobility observed in the region that can serve as both the ‘starting point’ and the ‘end point’ of the proposed typology?
To begin with, the travels of famous writers were closer to the royal archetype than to those of the “ordinary people” of the late modern period. The aforementioned Belyi, when outside his particularly Russian places of residence, can be seen, in retrospect, as visiting the territories of his symbolical conquests or domains as a writer, meeting local writers (apparently or indeed) emulating his style and praising his works. A recent research on symbolic and physical displacement (Finnin 2022) has demonstrated the power of artistic literature to de-domesticate and re-domesticate, claim and re-claim ruins and especially ‘ruins-in-the-making’ – desolate sites not necessarily to be demolished but be un-inhabited through turning them to museums. It is noteworthy that (re)claiming might come from a third party, neither from the displacing nor from the displaced one, yet on the behalf of the latter. May we move beyond the Crimean case (with its focal point, the Fountain of Tears in Bakhchysarai) and discern other dramas of (un-, re-)domestication of ruins, actual potential or renovated, in the region?
A less dramatic option displays the old citadel of Sinope, the dungeon of which developed into a permanent prison proper over the centuries. Intramuros but outside the prison, it was temporarily complemented by a hotel (demolished to open a public space by the sea) and later evacuated for good to enter a long process of restoration with the intention of being transformed into a touristic site (Özveren 2022). In the summer of 2024, before the place was officially inaugurated, it hosted the “International Ancient Sinop Symposium: The World of Mithridates the Great” for archaeologists and ancient historians, accompanied by an exhibition titled “Mithridates through the ages”. The participants were the first to use it while it was still smelling fresh paint and given a tour of the facility (private communication). Maybe here we should question ourselves what turns a building into a ruin – visible dilapidation and disintegration or a change of function that neither hides the previous function nor admits/recognises/respects it.
To relink the subtopics of ruins and types of experiencing a territory: may it be that the third type implies an attitude to ruins that is less pathetic than the first type and more engaged than the second type?
The general objective of the conference "The Black Sea as a Literary and Cultural Space (3): Ruins (Ancient and Modern) and Mobilities" is to bring together the issue of remnants (ruins) with that of the different types of experiences of a territory through bodily, symbolic, and imaginary mobilities.
Against this context, we suggest focussing on one particular kind of the third type of mobility charted above (oscillation between relatively modest mid-points) - namely, tourism (and, even more particularly, seaside tourism).
While there is a whole bibliography on the subject of ruins, exploring its literary, aesthetic, historical or archaeological valences, what has been lacking until now is a systematic reflection on ruins in leisure contexts: an applied discussion on the ways in which historical leisure practices have produced ruin and on the way in which existing ruins are exploited in the organisation of holidays.
The specific aim of the conference is to bring together the issue of ruins and that of beaches in an approach that seeks, in a complementary way, a specific understanding of the Black Sea as a space of tourism that has (or could have) the ruin as a (secondary) object: a tourism that is not just about entertainment and rest. The ancient form of nomadism, specific to these places (multiple, mixed, superimposed populations throughout history), has been replaced in modern times, once holidays have been democratised, by a different kind of nomadism, justified by leisure. The populations that had settled in these territories since Antiquity had built up a material and cultural world, which modern ‘nomads’ consume as relics. If you don’t go to the Black Sea to see the ruins it has to offer, you discover them once you are there, and you are obliged to define a way of relating to them. These are ruins on the beach, underwater ruins, sunken or architecturally ‘commoditised’ ancient cities (Histria, Tomis, Callatis, Dioscurias, Apollonia/Sozopolis, Messembria); islands that have disappeared (Ada-Kaleh), are mysterious (Insula Șerpilor [Snake Island]/St Achilles/Leuke) or claim holy relics (as the one of St. Ivan since 2010); shipwrecks, ghost ships (in 2017, a major archaeological project, the Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project expedition, discovered, at a depth of 1,800 metres, a spectacular cemetery of some sixty shipwrecks dating from Byzantine and Ottoman times).
The tourism of ruins is a kind of adjacent tourism, one that includes the ruin in an already existing holiday programme of beaches and baths, diving and museums. The paradox of ruins, which are always deserted and on which there are never any living or dead people, is that “the relationship to which their poverty and superbness condemn us is that of a definitive exteriority” (Scott, 2019: 21). In this case, we look at them as landscapes, in a ‘landscape’ framework, because it is effectively an absorption into the landscape that they had undergone, and thus a return of culture to nature (Simmel, 1958).
But this ‘ruin’ marine tourism also – and always – has a political dimension. It is also a tourism of memory, because in these cases there is a desire to remember that coexists with the forces of forgetting. The political dimension of ruins lies precisely in this tension between remembering and forgetting (Ricoeur, 2000). If, at least since the medieval Renaissances, there has been a category of people who, when confronted with ruins, adopt an attitude of pure desire to know (Momigliano, 1983), and if the patrimonialisation of classical ruins may today give the impression of a depoliticisedness of this attitude, there is another type of ruin whose visit/contemplation cannot dispense with the affirmation of a political identity or opposition to another. It is the ruins that memorialise the horrors of war and political regimes: those that become monuments to misfortune. Apart from Turkey, all the other countries bordering the Black Sea – Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldavia, Russia– have experienced totalitarian regimes. While these regimes did not operate entirely according to a “law of ruins” (like the utopian project that Albert Speer proposed to Hitler, when he drew up the architectural plans for Berlin with monuments destined to become ruins for thousands of years (see Stead 2003: 51)), there are large architectural structures of the same type in all these countries, all of which have now been abandoned. Such are camps for teenagers and children, above all (in Romania: Năvodari, 2 Mai, Costinești), but also hotel and restaurant networks, reflecting in a unique way the holiday programme of the time. There is an ‘administration’ that manages these ruins in all these countries, and manages them as a political object too (it can decide to conserve/restore them or destroy them); but there is also an imagination that invests them as such (because, as Ricoeur said, memory needs imagination to form remembrance).
The shores of the Black Sea present a complex picture, superimposing the most diverse ruins: ancient ruins, medieval ruins, war ruins, communist ruins, industrial ruins and contemporary ruins. To speak in this case of “regimes of ruins”, linked to the same place, would allow us to problematise this object in a complex way, and to give it new meanings through its connection with leisure practices.
Our call is equally open to literary scholars, historians, art historians, sociologists, linguists, cultural anthropologists, human geographers and archaeologists. A discussion that involves pictorial representations/photographic archives would be warmly encouraged.
Proposed axes of inquiry:
- contemporary ruins (buildings abandoned before completion)
- industrial ruins (ports and other)
- communist ruins (children’s and teenagers’ camps)
- medieval ruins
- ancient ruins (roads, theatres, tombs, remains)
- interwar ruins (casinos, villas, specific entertainment industry)
- underwater ruins (shipwrecks, ghost ships, sunken cities, vanished islands)
- invisible groins (we know they exist, they are documented, but they are not visible)
Cross-cutting issues:
- The problem of exile (self-exile in its Ovidian “founding” model): how does it contribute to the contemporary configuration of a ruin?
- The problem of self-estrangement from a territory for the sake of constructing its generalised image: how have such stance and pursuit affected manmade landmarks along the Black Sea coasts and their near hinterlands?
- How has seasonal migration shaped perception and handling of manmade landmarks, their ruinisation and their renovation?
- What does it mean to inhabit the ruins of the Black Sea?
- How do ruins intersect with different types of discourse?
- How do different types of experience of a territory (and of a maritime territory) engage with ruins?
References and preliminary bibliography:
Athane Adrahane, Des lucioles et des ruines. Quatre récits pour un réveil écologique (Paris : Le Pommier/ Humensis, 2024).
Albrecht Burkardt, Jérôme Grévy (dir.), Ruines politiques (Rennes : Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2024), https://books.openedition.org/pur/194258?lang=fr.
Anca Dan, “The Black Sea as a Scythian bow”, in Exploring the Hospitable Sea: Proceedings of the International Workshop on the Black Sea in Antiquity held in Thessaloniki, 21–23 September 2012, ed. by Manolis Manoledakis (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2013), pp. 39-58.
Rorry Finnin, Stalin’s Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity (Toronto–Buffalo–London: University of Toronto Press, 2022).
Anita Frison, “Depicting the Landscape. Andrej Belyj’s A Wind from the Caucasus and Armenia”, Studi Slavistici, vol. 16 (2019), no. 2, pp. 55-75.
László Földényi, Les espaces de la mort vivante. Kafka, De Chirico et les autres, traduit du hongrois par Natalia Zaremba-Huzsvai et Charles Zarumba (Belval : Circé, 2023).
Renaud Gagné, Cosmography and the idea of Hyperborea in Ancient Greece: a philology of worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge UP).
Peter E. Knox, ed., A Companion to Ovid (Chichester: Blackwell, 2009).
Luigi Magarotto, “Andrey Bely in Georgia: Seven Letters from A. Bely to T. Tabidze” The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 63 (1985), no. 3, pp. 388-416.
William Marx, Poétique des ruines, épisode 5/10, 23 decembrie 2023, https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/les-cours-du-college-de-france/poetique-des-ruines-6752044.
Matthew McGowan, Ovid in Exile: Power and Poetic Redress in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto (Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2009).
Stephen Mitchel, “In search of the Pontic community in antiquity”, in Representations of empire: Rome and the Mediterranean world, ed. by Alan K. Bowman, Hannah M. Cotton, Martin Goodman & Simon Price (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP; British Academy), 2002, pp. 35-64.
Arnaldo Momigliano, « L’histoire ancienne et l’Antiquaire », in id., Problèmes d’historiographie ancienne et moderne (Paris, Gallimard : 1983), p. 244-293.
Eyüp Özveren, “Unearthing the native town of Diogenes in Nazlı Eray’s fiction: Sinop as gateway of a different kind to the Black Sea world?”, Transponticae, vol. 1 (2022)[, no. 4], pp. 507-576.
Harsha Ram, “Andrej Belyj and Georgia: Georgian Modernism and the ‘Peripheral’ Reception of the Petersburg Text”, Russian Literature, vol. 58 (2005), pp. 243-276.
Paul Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Paris, Seuil, 2000.
Georg Simmel, « The Ruin », in The Hudson Review, vol. 11 (1958), no. 3 (Autumn), pp. 371-385, https://www.lma.lv/uploads/news/3653/files/simmel-the-ruin.pdf.
Diane Scott, Ruine. Invention d’un objet critique, Paris, Les Prairies Ordinaires, 2019.
Naomi Stead, “The Value of Ruins: Allegories of Destruction in Benjamin and Speer”, Form/Work: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Built Environment, no. 6 (October 2003), pp. 51-64.
Proposal Submission Guidelines:
Prospective speakers are invited to submit proposals addressing the conference concept (see below) in English or French. Each speaker will be assigned 20 minutes, and extra 10 minutes for discussion.
Paper proposals should be approximately 2500 characters long and should be accompanied by a list of 5 to 7 selected references relevant to the content of the proposal.
Paper proposals in French have to be sent to lamernoire25@gmail.com and as open copy (cc) to: monicavlad@yahoo.fr and ligia.tudurachi@gmail.com
Paper proposals in English have to be sent to lamernoire25@gmail.com and as open copy (cc) to: alina.p.buzatu@gmail.com, yljuckanov@ilit.bas.bg and bela_tsipuria@iliauni.edu.ge
Calendar:
Deadline for paper proposals: 10 July 2025
Notification of acceptance/non-acceptance: 1 September 2025
Accepted speakers will be invited to submit a longer version of their presentation (5,000 to 7,000 characters) in the other language (presentations in English must be accompanied by an extended summary in French, and vice versa) by November 15, in order to facilitate communication and strengthen cohesion during the conference.
Publications:
Articles based on the presentations may be published in Transponticae (https://sites.google.com/view/transponticae/home), a journal and series dedicated to Black Sea studies, or in Analele Universității Ovidius, seria Filologie: https://litere.univ-ovidius.ro/Anale/annals_english.php
Participation fees:
40 euros for PhD students
80 euros for established researchers
The fees cover coffee breaks, conference materials, and the convivial dinner on November 21.
Participants are kindly asked to cover their own accommodation and travel expenses.
August 2025
Please see the link below for information about the Kamylla and Czesław Kaszuba College Scholarship.
Polish American Journal Foundation (polamjournal.com)
The deadline to apply is August 31st.
All questions/inquiries should be directed to the Polish American Journal Foundation.
On behalf of the International and North American Dostoevsky Societies, we are excited to announce that the call for papers for the XIX International Dostoevsky Symposium (IDS) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, June 16-19, 2026 is now available! All the details and the Google Form for abstract submission are available on the Symposium website (https://rusaires.wixsite.com/xix-simposio/xix-simposium-eng) and also on the North American and International Dostoevsky Societies’ website (https://dostoevsky.org/symposia/symposium-updates/).
All attendees of the XIX IDS must be members in good standing, either of the International Dostoevsky Society if they are from outside North America, or NADS if they are from North America. To join either Society, please visit: https://dostoevsky.org/membership/. Although the organizers have not specified an abstract length, we suggest keeping abstracts to a maximum of 300 words. The closing date for IDS XIX submissions is August 31st, 2025. Please make sure that you submit by this date.
A limited number of Martinsen travel bursaries (https://bloggerskaramazov.com/martinsen-award/) will be available for North American-based graduate students and scholars who are precariously employed and will be awarded on a competitive basis. More information will be provided after acceptances are announced by the organizing committee.
In collaboration with the XIX IDS, the International Dostoevsky Society is hosting its 2nd Dostoevsky Video Competition. The deadline for submissions is April 1st, 2026 and all details can be found here: https://dostoevsky.org/international-dostoevsky-society-video-competition/.
September 2025
Manuscripts are due by September 1, 2025
Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies
Call for Papers
Special Issue on Russian Postcolonial Studies
Guest Editor: Tamar Koplatadze, Christ Church, University of Oxford, tamar.koplatadze@chch.ox.ac.uk
Russia and the countries that were incorporated into the Soviet Union have not historically received extensive critical attention within the postcolonial discourse. In the wake of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, scholarly interest has grown in re-assessing established methodologies and engaging with postcolonial theory when studying these countries. Postcolonial approaches can be key to analyzing the link between imperialism and situations of core-periphery disparity, both past and ongoing, whether expressed in the man-made famines in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, the overproduction of cotton in Central Asia, the nuclear testing in Semipalatinsk, the extraction of natural resources in Siberia, or post-Soviet migration patterns. Moreover, local writers, creative artists and activists addressing these questions are increasingly situating their works within the global postcolonial tradition.
This special issue aims to provide an interdisciplinary inquiry of the current decolonial turn, build on existing scholarship and bring to the fore new postcolonial interventions, while also countering the pitfalls of the “decolonial bandwagon” (Moosavi) such as tokenism and uncritical use of decolonial terminology. We welcome contributions that critically engage with postcolonial and decolonial theory, attempt to bridge Western and local epistemologies, compare different geographical contexts of (post)coloniality, or untangle various types of decoloniality – including political, epistemological, cultural and aesthetic, while addressing, among others, the following themes:
- Critical theory
- Literature, Culture and Language
- Comparative studies of (post)coloniality
- History
- Race
- Gender
- Environment
- Migration
- Activism
Submission Instructions
Manuscripts following the journal guidelines and formatted in MLA style should be submitted by September 1, 2025 at https://journals.upress.ufl.edu/jgps/submit
Soyuz: The Research Network for Postsocialist Cultural Studies is accepting submissions for the 2025 Sonja Luehrmann Article Prize for the best published peer-reviewed article related to the culture, history, or politics of (post)socialism, broadly defined. Although we encourage submissions that contribute to the advancement and nuancing of contemporary scholarly understandings of (post)socialism, (post)communism, and decolonization, submitted entries may be on any topic that falls within the broad scope of interest represented by Soyuz.
First peer-reviewed articles or book chapters published in English in 2023 or 2024 by graduate students and untenured faculty within 10 years of earning their doctoral degree are eligible for consideration. Scholars from any discipline with any geographic area of interest are encouraged to apply.
A total of $500 will be awarded as cash prizes, presented to the winner and any candidates selected for honorable mentions. The winner of the 2025 prize will be encouraged to serve on the committee adjudicating the next year’s prize.
If warranted, an honorable mention may be named.
Submissions should be sent electronically to soyuz.interest.group@gmail.com no later than September 15, 2025 by midnight. Please include “Soyuz Article Prize” in the subject line.
The concept of cultural resistance has become integral to sociological, political, and cultural studies. Emerging after the "youth revolutions" of the late 1960s (the "long year 1968"), this concept encompasses practices, artistic works, and initiatives aimed at revising or deconstructing established social hierarchies, challenging hegemonic "common sense" and dominant tastes, and confronting neo-fascist and right-wing populist movements as sociocultural forces.
Cultural resistance creates a unified framework for understanding both the politicization of cultural practices (poetry readings, exhibitions) and the aestheticization of political actions (performative political speech, political movements developing subcultural characteristics).
While this concept was initially developed through examples from Western states and their colonies, it has only recently been applied to earlier historical periods. The Center for the Study of Russian Culture at Amherst College invites scholars to explore how this concept might illuminate social and cultural history of Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and post-Soviet states.
This conference will examine the prospects and limitations of applying the concept of cultural resistance to the history of the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and post-Soviet countries.
We welcome researchers from diverse disciplines including literary studies, history, anthropology, sociology, political science, education, and of theater, music, and film studies.
We propose to discuss the following range of issues at the conference:
· Actors of cultural resistance: individuals and groups, mechanisms of group formation, struggle for visibility and political representation.
· Methods and strategies of cultural resistance. Types of resistance and subversion: public, semi-public, underground, internal ("for the drawer"). Languages of description and self-description, the role of "traditional" and new media, the role of humanities and social sciences in legitimizing certain forms and places of cultural resistance.
· Places of cultural resistance – real and virtual. In what geographical spaces/topographical locations was cultural resistance possible? What were the institutional "sites" of cultural resistance: magazine editorial offices, websites, clubs, or other "assemblage points"? What real or imagined communities (in Benedict Anderson's terminology) might have formed around these institutional "sites"?
· Regional differences in the strategies and intensity of cultural resistance, horizontal interaction between "points of resistance" independent of (or using) the imperial center.
· The diversity of cultural resistance programs and agendas.
· Does cultural resistance always entail the emergence of innovative practices or initiatives?
Conference Details
Place: Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA
Dates: March 28-29, 2026
Submission Information
To participate, please send the following to mmayofis@amherst.edu:
- Name, institutional affiliation, city, and email
- Tentative paper title
- Abstract (maximum 300 words)
- Brief CV highlighting publications relevant to the conference theme
Deadline for conference proposals: September 1, 2025
The official working language of the conference is English.
Travel and Accommodation Support
We are pleased to provide full travel expenses and three nights of accommodation for all invited participants. These arrangements will be handled directly by the conference organizers.
Proposed title: Political Thought in Central and Eastern Europe
Guest editors:
Aurelian Craiutu, Department of Political Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA, acraiutu@iu.edu
Venelin Ganev, Department of Political Science, Miami University of Ohio, USA, ganevvi@MiamiOH.edu
Rationale:
Ideas have always mattered a great deal in Central and Eastern Europe where they had lasting and wide-ranging political implications. The major world wars that started there upended the old global order and redefined the map of the entire world. Regrettably, unlike the case of Russia, the political thought of Central and Eastern Europe has remained understudied in Western academic circles. To give just an example, the influential series of Cambridge History of Political Thought has had virtually no place for Central and Eastern European thinkers. The impact of the ideas of the Enlightenment and Romanticism on intellectual and political life in Central and Eastern Europe has been understudied, along with the emergence of emancipatory national movements or the growth of irrationalism and anti-Semitism in the twentieth century.
It would not be an exaggeration to claim that the political thought of the entire region has remained a terra incognita for the scholarly community. This has changed with the recent publication of the two-volume A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe by a team of Central and Eastern European scholars led by Balázs Trencsényi (CEU). By using a sophisticated methodological approach, the contributors to this project managed to shed fresh light on the surprising richness of political thought in the region, beginning with the Enlightenment, continuing with long nineteenth-century and the interwar period, and ending with the period of communism and the first post-communist decades.
The purpose of this special section for EEPS is to build upon the path-breaking scholarly contribution made by A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe. We want to examine further the extent to which it is legitimately speak of a genuine Central and Eastern European Sonderweg in political thought and intellectual history. We plan to include articles written by scholars in several fields (political theory, philosophy, political economy, history, law, sociology, and religion). They are expected to explore in detail the diversity of ideas, venues, and approaches and explore common themes discussed by Central and Eastern European authors. The selected papers will analyze the interaction between the institutional and intellectual contexts and explain how ideas emerged from these contexts and contributed to their revision over time. Special attention will be paid to the development of political ideologies in the region and how Central and Eastern European political thinkers developed unorthodox and, sometimes, original solutions and theories of resistance to the communist regimes.
We expect the authors to focus on individual authors or themes that can be studied in diachronic manner, perhaps considering 1989 as a Sattelzeit, a major threshold. Authors will be invited to place the thinkers of Central and Eastern Europe in a global market of ideas and follow the complex ways in which they communicated with other colleagues in the region and beyond. They will also be encouraged to trace the important differences within Central and Eastern Europe and draw any relevant comparisons between countries and authors, where possible. We envisage the contributions to this special section as part of a new trend in comparative thought whose main aim is to enrich our political imagination and vocabulary.
Schedule:
Submission of abstracts and short bios (250 words each): September 1, 2025
Selection of abstracts and communication of decision to authors: October 15, 2025
Deadline for manuscript submission: October 1, 2026
Publication: Spring 2027
Submission instructions:
Abstracts of 250 words should be accompanied by titles and short bios. Invited manuscripts, typed double-spaced, should be submitted to the two Guest Editors as e-mail attachments (with “For special section on political thought in CEE” in the subject line). The author’s full address should be supplied in the e-mail message. Each submission should have an abstract and a list of key words.
Length: 8,000-10,000 words (including Endnotes and Bibliography). Please follow the Instructions for Authors on the journal’s website when preparing your paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/author-instructions/EEP.
Please submit your scholarly essays to the second annual Donna Tussing Orwin Essay Competition for early career scholars in Tolstoy Studies Journal.
Eligible scholars (undergraduate, graduate, pre-tenure) are encouraged to submit essays (approximately 8,000 words) on any topic related to Tolstoy. Please send submissions to tgershko@andrew.cmu.edu. They will be evaluated by the editors as well as a panel of judges, and the winning essay will receive a cash prize and publication in Tolstoy Studies Journal. The deadline for submission is the second Friday in September (9/12/2025). The winner will be announced in November, and the selected essay will be published in our next issue in early 2026.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Creative Bodies—Creative Minds
The fourth international, interdisciplinary conference in gender research
University of Graz, 30-31 March 2026
Since its inception in 2018, the interdisciplinary conference in gender research Creative Bodies—Creative Minds has, in its three cycles, brought together scholars, practitioners, and activists to explore the relationship between gender and creativity in a variety of fields. They engaged with everyday and vernacular creativities, including material and intangible DIY forms, creative self-fashioning, coping strategies, and resourceful adaptations to social and political circumstances by communities, groups, and individuals. These encounters have treated creativity as a social and collective process that is power-dependent and deeply gendered.
The fourth conference aims to continue this line of inquiry by exploring more closely the relationship between creativity, vulnerability, and subversion. The last decade has seen an increasing focus on vulnerability in the humanities and social sciences, even what we could term a “vulnerability turn” in some disciplines, such as in cultural and gender studies. “Vulnerability” has also come to an increased usage in political rhetoric, policies, and everyday language. However, the concept of vulnerability has come under increasing academic, political and public scrutiny, highlighting its ambiguity, with both positive and negative connotations. Critical research has also discussed the (mis)uses of the concept in political debates and in concrete social policies, where it often deepens social marginalisation and vulnerability instead of reducing it. Gender studies and feminist scholars, in particular, have persuasively exposed the androcentric and paternalistic bias in the cultural understanding of vulnerability as a condition of passivity and lack of agency in need of remedy. Instead, they have emphasized the relational nature of vulnerability that makes it a universal dimension of human existence, bringing attention to its social and situational aspects. Exploring vulnerability in relation to resistance has been powerful in revealing the agentic potential of vulnerability to challenge oppression, inequality, and injustice, as witnessed, for example, in the mobilizations and democratic struggles of the last decade in Southeastern Europe.
The fourth Creative Bodies—Creative Minds conference in 2026 invites interdisciplinary contributions that explore the entanglements between creativity, vulnerability, subversion and gender in different socio-cultural, political, economic and everyday settings.
Keynote speakers:
Isla Cowan, Independent Playwright and Theatre Maker, Edinburgh Jennifer Ramme, Department of Sociology, University of Graz
The areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
Everyday creativity, vulnerability, subversion and gender Creativity as a response to restrictive biopolitics and gender norms Intersectional approaches to creativity, vulnerability and subversion (race, ethnicity, age, class, gender, sexuality, ability) Collective creativities in contesting collective vulnerabilities Creativity, vulnerability and subversion in education, arts, and activism Material, temporal, situational, and relational aspects of creativity, vulnerability and subversion Creativity, vulnerability and subversion in the digital realm Creative subversion– subverting creativity imperatives Creative methodologies and creative research in social sciences and humanities Creative addresses of gendered vulnerabilities in medicine, science, and technology
We are inviting proposals for presentations from scholars of all career stages and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines including, but not limited to: sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, human geography, political science, gender studies, art, performance, social work, communication studies and journalism, history, literary studies, social studies of science and technology and environmental studies.
Please send a 250-word abstract and a 150-word bio note before 10th September 2025 to Creative.Bodies@uni-graz.at
Registration fee: 190 EUR
Registration fee (student presenters): 130 EUR
The conference registration fee includes the conference dinner, two lunches, tea/coffee breaks and the conference pack with the book of abstracts.
Information on registration and updates on the program will be available on the conference website: https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcreative-bodies.uni-graz.at%2Fde%2F&data=05%7C02%7Creei%40iu.edu%7C548f2b162ce340279ee408dd6abf05d7%7C1113be34aed14d00ab4bcdd02510be91%7C1%7C0%7C638784090841101578%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=%2BtJTdcyxN0SHkPv1wJrgvUw2Z2U94Q2BBOGh5C4juL8%3D&reserved=0.
Graz, a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site and Cultural Capital of Europe for 2003, is the capital of the Austrian province of Styria and the home of Austria’s second largest university.
Conference organizers:
Libora Oates-Indruchová, Department of Sociology, University of Graz Zorica Siročić, Department of Sociology, University of Graz Mónica Cano Abadía, BBMRI-ERIC Carolyn Defrin, Centre for Southeast European Studies, University of Graz Barbara Hönig, Department of Social Work, FH JOANNEUM – University of Applied Sciences Graz Frithjof Nungesser, Department of Sociology, University of Graz
Important dates:
Submission of abstracts: 10 September 2025 Informing about abstract acceptance: mid-November 2025 Conference registration opens: 15 December 2025 Conference registration ends: 31 January 2026
October 2025
The UC Undergraduate Journal of Slavic and East/Central European Studies is one of the few publications for undergraduate students focusing on Slavic and East/Central European topics. Undergraduate students working in any relevant discipline are invited to submit their papers for consideration to the journal. All papers will be subject to peer review.
The submission period is open from now until October 6, 2025. Late submissions will not be considered.
Please send your papers to Prof. Roman Koropeckyj, Editor-in-Chief, koropeck@humnet.ucla.edu and Sylvie Vidan, Managing Editor, sylvievg@g.ucla.edu
Please also send the following information to Prof. Yelena Furman yfurman@humnet.ucla.edu: your name, preferred email, paper title, and name and email of your advisor. Please do this now even if you are planning to submit your paper later so that we have a preliminary headcount.
It is expected that you will work with your advisor between now and the submission deadline on preparing your paper. Your papers should have a well-formulated and well-developed thesis, with plenty of textual evidence to back it up. When citing a non-English language source, please give the quote in the English translation in the body, and in the original language in the footnotes. Your paper must contain evidence of research, in the form of direct citation, in a Slavic and/or East/Central European language. Papers lacking such evidence will not be considered for peer review.
The papers should be between 15 and 25 double-spaced pages, including footnotes and a Works Cited list. For the Works Cited, please use the Chicago Manual of Style format (available online). Please send your submission as a .doc or .docx file; do not send pdfs.
The journal now welcomes submissions of reviews of academic books dealing with any aspect of Slavic and/or East/Central European Studies, with up to five appearing in each issue. The book under review should have been published within the past two years and may be in any language. Please return your review as soon as you can, within the limits imposed by a careful and discriminating reading; the need for a fair and serious reading is fundamental.
- Unless otherwise stipulated, please confine your review to approximately 1,000 words (1,250 words for edited collections), including a brief summary of the book's contents.
- State as clearly as possible the book's interpretation, methodology, style, and its strengths and weaknesses. If possible, please recommend a specific readership.
If you are not familiar with the journal, you can get acquainted with it here:
We look forward to receiving your submissions.
Year Round
Dear Grads and Undergrads,
A summer internship with the theme of Advancing Digital Democracy in Eastern Europe. All questions/inquiries regarding this opportunity including the deadline for applying should be directed to:
Lupton P. Abshire
Strategic Outreach
Advisory Voting Initiative
A Vote, a Voice, and the Power of Participation
www.advisoryvote.us
For Russian Language Teachers, Students, and Others Interested in Russia,
On behalf of the American Home in Vladimir, Russia – which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year – I would like to remind you about several program opportunities and deadlines.
Applications Accepted All Year
(http://www.ah33.ru/study-russian/)
| Duration | One-to-one instruction | Group instruction (2-5+ people, 15-35% discount) |
|---|---|---|
| Four weeks | $3,651 | $2,994 - 2,254 |
| Six weeks | $5,009 | $4,133 - 3,044 |
| Eight weeks | $6,367 | $5,272 - 3,834 |
Longer and shorter programs, from one week to a year, are also possible.
The benefits of the American Home’s long-standing Intensive Russian Program – the main program offers one-to-one instruction to each participant – are provided to group participants:
- Experienced faculty specializing in teaching Russian to non-native speakers;
- Program and schedule customized to the needs of each group of students;
- Study from one week to one year;
- Individual home-stay with a Russian family;
- “Russian friend-conversation partner” program;
- On-site administrative support;
- Well-equipped classrooms in a comfortable, home-like, atmosphere;
- Excursions in Vladimir and to Suzdal (a UNESCO World Heritage site) and Bogoliubovo;
- Opportunities to meet and socialize with some of the more than 600 Russians participating in the American Home English Program and others;
- Opportunities to participate in a variety of activities—for example, volunteering at an orphanage
New master’s program “Estonian and Finno-Ugric Languages” (EFUL) at the Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics at the University of Tartu.
This two-year MA program is unique in combining in-depth language learning with comprehensive, English-based studies in linguistics. Because classes are taught in English (with the exception of language classes, of course), students whose Estonian language skills are not advanced enough to take university classes in Estonian can still study Estonian and Finno-Ugric languages in Tartu, and take full advantage of the great opportunities that Estonia has to offer.
Students in the program can choose between specializing in either Estonian or Finno-Ugric languages. In addition to attending the institute’s advanced classes in linguistics and digital methods taught by cutting-edge researchers and lecturers, studying in Tartu has a clear advantage because of its location in Estonia and in proximity to other Finno-Ugric language areas. This gives our students not only the chance to practice Estonian on a daily basis, but also access other Finno-Ugric languages, partly via the many smaller Finno-Ugric language communities in Estonia. In addition, students can develop their digital skills in modules on computational linguistics and programming, in collaboration with the University of Tartu’s Centre for Digital Humanities and Information Society.
We are happy to offer a number of scholarship opportunities, including full tuition waivers. The final details about the application process are still being worked out, but will be announced next month. For more information about the program as well as about living and studying in Tartu, check out both the EFUL website at https://ut.ee/en/curriculum/estonian-and-finno-ugric-languages and the Study-in-Estonia website www.studyinestonia.ee.
I have also attached our EFUL flyer. And of course, feel free to contact me or the program director Prof. Gerson Klumpp (gerson.klumpp@ut.ee) if you have any other questions.
Please see the link below for unpaid part/full time internships with the US Department of Education. All inquiries/questions should be directed to the point of contact at the bottom of the advert. Thank you.
Internship Opportunities with the Office of International and Foreign Language Education
On behalf of the Modern Humanities Research Association, the editors of the Modern Language Review (MLR) are happy to announce that the journal will henceforward award an annual Article Prize. This is in recognition of the success of our inaugural article prize – details of the winners below.
MLR publishes articles and book reviews on modern and medieval English and European languages, literatures, and cultures around the globe where European languages are spoken. The journal welcomes scholarship that takes a global or comparative approach as well as articles that appeal to a broad cross-section of scholars working on areas including, but not limited to, literature, the visual and performing arts, sociolinguistics, cultural history, and Translation Studies. We encourage submissions from scholars at all stages, including postgraduate researchers.
The Article Prize for volume 120 will be awarded to an outstanding article published in volume 120, which will appear in four issues in 2025. Submissions can be on any topic appropriate to the journal’s remit. The competition is open to all researchers. Submissions will be evaluated by a panel of the journal’s editors. Any piece accepted for publication in volume 120 will be considered for this prize. We encourage early submission of your work. Articles must have been through peer review and finalized for inclusion in MLR by mid-March 2025.
The winner will receive a prize of £750 and be interviewed for the Modern Humanities Research Association website. At the judges’ discretion, an Editorial Commendation prize of £350 may also be awarded.
Articles must be written in English and conform to MLR guidelines. Articles are typically about 8000 words in length, including footnotes. Articles should conform to MHRA style and be accompanied by an abstract of maximum 100 words. See full submission guidance at http://www.mhra.org.uk/pdf/mlr-submission-guidelines.pdf
The winner of the inaugural MLR Article Prize (for volume 118 of the journal) was Kathryn Bryan for her article ‘Fantine in the Belle Époque: Representation of the Fille-Mère in L'Assiette au beurre (1902) and Marcelle Tinayre's La Rebelle (1905)’. Editorial commendation went to Margarita Vaysman for her article ‘The Trouble with Queer Celebrity: Aleksandr Aleksandrov (Nadezhda Durova)'s A Year of Life in St Petersburg (1838)’.
For links to the articles (Open Access) and an interview with the winner, see
https://www.mhra.org.uk/news/2023/12/19/modern-language-review-prize-kathryn-bryan.html
For queries on the Article Prize, contact the MLR’s General Editor, Dr Lucy O’Meara: leo@kent.ac.uk
MLR publishes articles and book reviews on modern and medieval English and European languages, literatures, and cultures around the globe where European languages are spoken. The journal welcomes scholarship that takes a global or comparative approach as well as articles that appeal to a broad cross-section of scholars working on areas including, but not limited to, literature, the visual and performing arts, sociolinguistics, cultural history, and Translation Studies. We encourage submissions from scholars at all stages, including postgraduate researchers.
The Article Prize for volume 120 will be awarded to an outstanding article published in volume 120, which will appear in four issues in 2025. Submissions can be on any topic appropriate to the journal’s remit. The competition is open to all researchers. Submissions will be evaluated by a panel of the journal’s editors. Any piece accepted for publication in volume 120 will be considered for this prize. We encourage early submission of your work. Articles must have been through peer review and finalized for inclusion in MLR by mid-March 2025.
The winner will receive a prize of £750 and be interviewed for the Modern Humanities Research Association website. At the judges’ discretion, an Editorial Commendation prize of £350 may also be awarded.
Articles must be written in English and conform to MLR guidelines. Articles are typically about 8000 words in length, including footnotes. Articles should conform to MHRA style and be accompanied by an abstract of maximum 100 words. See full submission guidance at http://www.mhra.org.uk/pdf/mlr-submission-guidelines.pdf
The winner of the inaugural MLR Article Prize (for volume 118 of the journal) was Kathryn Bryan for her article ‘Fantine in the Belle Époque: Representation of the Fille-Mère in L'Assiette au beurre (1902) and Marcelle Tinayre's La Rebelle (1905)’. Editorial commendation went to Margarita Vaysman for her article ‘The Trouble with Queer Celebrity: Aleksandr Aleksandrov (Nadezhda Durova)'s A Year of Life in St Petersburg (1838)’.
For links to the articles (Open Access) and an interview with the winner, see
https://www.mhra.org.uk/news/2023/12/19/modern-language-review-prize-kathryn-bryan.html
For queries on the Article Prize, contact the MLR’s General Editor, Dr Lucy O’Meara: leo@kent.ac.uk