Events

Stephen Kotkin is the John P. Birkelund Professor in History and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is also a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He directs Princeton's Institute for International and Regional Studies and co-directs its Program in the History and Practice of Diplomacy. His books include Uncivil Society, Armageddon Averted, and Magnetic Mountain. Kotkin was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928.
This talk is sponsored by the Georges Lurcy Lecture Series Fund at Amherst College.
The event is free and open to the public.

Klára Móricz is Joseph E. and Grace. W. Valentine Professor at Amherst College. Her book Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music was published by University of California Press in 2008, and the volume Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Lourié, co-edited with Simon Morrison, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013. Her edition of volume 42 (Concerto for Orchestra) of the Béla Bartók Complete Critical Edition (G. Henle Verlag, Edition Musica Budapest) appeared in 2017. She is co-editor of two anthologies for The Oxford History of Western Music. Her articles appeared in Journal of American Musicological Society, Cambridge Opera Journal, American Music, Journal of Jewish Identities, Pushkin Review, Vienna Slavic Yearbook, and Twentieth-Century Music. She has contributed essays, among others, to Western Music and Race (2007), Stravinsky and His World (2013), and Modernism and Opera (2016). She was co-editor of Journal of Musicology (2009–2015) and has served on the board of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Oxford Handbooks on Music, Jewish Music Forum, AMS Jewish Studies, and the Béla Bartók Complete Critical Edition. She has recently completed a book, In Stravinsky’s Orbit: Composing the Exilic Experience in Russian Paris.
The event is open and free to the public. Reception to follow.

After a decade of relative economic prosperity and political laziness, the 2010s became the decade of growing conflict between Putin's authoritarian regime and the young people of Russia, demanding freedom and social justice. Among them there are rockers and rappers, using Internet and live gigs to express their anger. The report will be illustrated by music and videos.
Artemy Troitsky is a journalist, music critic, promoter and broadcaster who played a vital role in popularizing independent Soviet rock music, as well as establishing the post-Soviet musical culture. He has published a large number of works about the Soviet underground that have been published in Great Britain, the United States, Europe and Japan. Currently, Troitsky resides in Estonia, primarily involved with social journalism, but continuing to host radio-projects “Pesni i Plyaski” (Song and Dance) and “Zapiski iz Podpolya” (Notes from the Underground).

Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible, was no ordinary movie. Commissioned by Joseph Stalin in 1941 to justify state terror in the sixteenth century and in the twentieth, the film's politics, style, and epic scope aroused controversy even before it was released. In This Thing of Darkness, Joan Neuberger offers a sweeping account of the conception, making, and reception of Ivan the Terrible that weaves together Eisenstein's expansive thinking and experimental practice with a groundbreaking new view of artistic production under Stalin. Drawing on Eisenstein's unpublished production notebooks, diaries, and manuscripts, Neuberger's riveting narrative chronicles Eisenstein's personal, creative, and political challenges and reveals the ways cinematic invention, artistic theory, political critique, and historical and psychological analysis went hand in hand in this famously complex film. Ivan the Terrible, she argues, shows us one of the world's greatest filmmakers and one of the 20th century's greatest artists observing the world around him and experimenting with every element of film art to explore the psychology of political ambition, uncover the history of recurring cycles of violence and lay bare the tragedy of absolute power.

The Symposium in Russian-Jewish History: Exhibition of the Russian-Jewish Journals

A Talk by Marina Mogilner: “[De]racializing Modern Jewishness between the “Boasian Revolution” in the US and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia”

A Talk by Brian Horowitz: “Jabotinsky's Russia and the Politics and Culture of Pre-State Zionism”