Scholarly ZEIT GUEST: A video podcast from the Harriman Institute
The war in Ukraine has impacted all aspects of our research on the region. With this in mind, Mark Lipovetsky, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University, and Tatiana Efremova, Mellon Teaching Fellow at the Harriman Institute and Lecturer in Slavic Languages, launched a video podcast exploring contemporary challenges in Slavic Studies and ways to overcome them. The first season of Scholarly ZEIT GUEST includes five interviews with leading Slavic Studies scholars. Each interview examines the knowledge and experience that can be drawn from each scholar’s specific field—anthropology, literary studies, Ukrainian studies, comparative literature, and film—to help us reimagine the post-Soviet region in the face of the ongoing war.
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The first episode features a conversation with Serguei Oushakine, Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University, who contextualizes the social landscape of the present war. In the second episode, Efremova and Lipovetsky talk to popular culture expert Eliot Borenstein, Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at NYU, about ideology, conspiracy theories, and the latest anti-war memes. The third episode features Gabriella Safran, Eva Chernov Lokey, Professor of Jewish Studies and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University, and focuses on the framework of subaltern studies and translation work. The Institute is grateful to Myroslav Shkandrij, Professor Emeritus of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Manitoba and guest of episode four, who agreed to talk about the weight of imperial imagination and the role of Slavic Studies in facilitating future cultural dialogue. Finally, the fifth episode is a conversation with Lilya Kaganovsky, Professor of Slavic Languages and Culture at UCLA and a film and media studies scholar, who shares ideas about the latest trends in documentary and feature film-making coming from the region.
The podcast is produced and cohosted by Tatiana Efremova and Mark Lipovetsky with technical support from IMATS & Sloate Media Center at Barnard College. The Institute is especially grateful to Rachel James, Eva-Quenby Johnson, and the production studio team @barnard.media.center.