General Public

Nicholas Sambanis joins Yale as the Kalsi Family Professor of Political Science. He previously taught at Penn (2016-2023) and Yale (2001-2016), and he worked at the World Bank Development Economics Research Group (1999-2001). Sambanis is an expert on civil wars, ethnic conflict, and the politics of migration. His writing combines theories and methods from the fields of international relations, comparative politics, and political psychology to study processes of identity formation and change and the ways that identity politics shape conflict outcomes. He is the founder and faculty director of the Identity & Conflict Lab (ICL@Yale), a research group that studies both violent and non-violent inter-group conflict. His current writing is on how social identities shape individual behavior, how conflict affects identities, and on which interventions can help reduce intergroup conflict in its various guises, with particular focus on native-immigrant conflict.

The Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Program presents Nadieszda Kizenko, Professor of History, University of Albany; Yale ISM Fellow, on “Showing secret words: the representation of sacramental confession in Orthodox Russia and Ukraine”

In its emphasis on the spoken word, the rite of sacramental confession seems to resist visual representation. In Orthodox Christian Russia and Ukraine as in the rest of Europe, confession tends to appear in literature more often than it does in images. But there are some exceptions. This lecture looks at how confession was depicted in frescoes of the Last Judgment, illustrations of the seven sacraments, and intercessory icons. Because confession in the Russian empire was a legal requirement as well as a religious one, it also examines the political context of its representations. Late imperial images of convicted criminals refusing confession gave way to even more critical representations after the revolutions of 1917—and re-emerged and changed after the fall of communism, in forms ranging from porcelain figurines to Maidan photographs to memes.

Lunch at 12:30pm ET, talk at 1:00pm ET
Location: HQ, Rm 136, 1st fl, 320 York St.
Part of the European & Russian Studies Community Lunch Seminar Series

BIO: Nadieszda Kizenko researches and teaches Russian history, with a focus on religion and culture. She explores the history of Orthodox Christianity, saints’ lives as a historical source, lived religion, political liturgy, women’s written confessions, and depictions of religion in film. Her first book, A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People (Penn State University Press, 2000) examined the cult of a charismatic priest whose cult spanned the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A Russian edition appeared as “Святой Нашего Времени: о. Иоанн Кронштадтский и русский народ» (Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2006). Her history of confession in Russia spanning four centuries, Good for the Souls: A History of Confession in the Russian Empire, was published with Oxford University Press in 2021. She has now begun a new project exploring the intersection of women, devotional practice, and writing.

Prof. Kizenko’s courses and seminars cover Russian history, East European history, religion and film, and European history in general. Recent dissertations supervised by Prof. Kizenko include: “Science and Culture on the Soviet Screen: Russian and Member Republic Biographical Films during the Early Cold War, 1946-1953,” “Promiscuous Pioneers of Morality: The Code of Ethics of a Secret Service Functionary in Communist Poland as Set by Law and Practice, 1944—1989,” “Sacrifice in the Name of Sacred Duty: The Representation of the Decembrist Wives in Russian Culture, 1825-Present,” and “Striving for Salvation: Margaret Anna Cusack, Sainthood, Religious Foundations and Revolution in Ireland, 1830-1922.”

This talk encapsulates an ongoing book project about the changing ways we engage in politics when public truths cease to be factual, wars are fought digitally, and knowledge is governed by AI. The 21st century was expected by many to be a time of radical, post-historical enlightenment, marked by an increasing velocity of scientific and technological innovation, interconnection, and knowledge sharing. It is, however, also a time of consecutive crises, discursive sectarianism and an anachronistic, ahistorical, yet hyper-mediated Russia’s war in Ukraine, fought with no rational purpose, meaningful reason, or clear format.

It is therefore obvious that we find ourselves at a time of a shifting regime of truth. On one hand, Western political and epistemological hegemony is seceding to non-Western political cultures. On the other hand, digital culture empowers dis-enlightened forms of knowledge-making and communication, driven by a different logic than the one we are used to. The result of this “dimming” of the Enlightenment is an emergence of memetic politics: a non-linear, associative, and performative form of political culture, where affect and representation rather than empirical evidence and factual presence dictate the dynamics of political processes, knowledge, and truth-making.

Lunch at 12:30pm ET, talk at 1:00pm ET
Location: Luce Hall, Rm 202, 2nd fl, 34 Hillhouse Ave
Zoom: Register for the webinar link- https://bit.ly/ERSLunch-Feb1624
Part of the European & Russian Studies Community Lunch Seminar Series

Dr. Arvydas Grišinas is Fulbright Visiting Fellow at Yale University and Researcher at Kaunas University of Technology. He also held visiting scholar positions at Yale University, Uppsala University (Sweden) and Institute for Human Sciences (Austria). His work centers on post-Soviet political identity formation in Central and Eastern Europe. He received his Ph.D. in Politics and Government from the University of Kent (Great Britain) in 2015, having finished his undergraduate education in History and Anthropology at Vilnius University (Lithuania).

Dr. Grišinas is the author of a book titled Politics with a Human Face: Identity and Experience in Post-Soviet Europe (Routledge, 2018) that examines how identity formation, symbolism, historical narratives, political images, and other human factors shape politics in Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of the post-Soviet European region.

He is currently working on a second book, exploring the challenges that the current technological, political and intellectual developments present to the enlightened processes of truth and meaning-making in politics, war and culture. The book explores topics of symbolism, performative politics and practices of truth as the ground for the emerging new Intuitive Politics, as it unfolds in both Eastern Europe and the West.

Complexities of Resistance: Partisan Films from Eastern Europe and the Balkans Film Series presents a film screening of FAREWELL UNTIL THE NEXT WAR (Nasvidenje v Naslednji Vojni)
SR Slovenia, 1980. 117 minutes. DCP. Slovenian Film Archive, Ljubljana.
Directed by Živojin Pavlović

on Thursday, March 30, 2024, 7:00 p.m.
Humanities Quadrangle, Screening Room L02
320 York Street, New Haven, CT 06511
Free and open to the public | All films will be shown with English subtitles

Continuing the demythologizing of the Yugoslav partisan struggle that he began three years earlier with Manhunt (shown in the fall segment of our series), with this stunningly shot work Pavlović created what is probably the most bitter and most controversial of all partisan films. Farewell Until the Next War filters its representation of conflict through the interwoven memories of a former German soldier and a former Yugoslav partisan who meet while on holiday in Spain. Presented by Spencer Small, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Sponsors:
Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Program; European Studies Council; Whitney Humanities Center; Yale Film Archive; Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; and Film and Media Studies Program

About the Film Series: In the aftermath of World War II, several European states started reconstructing and reimagining their identities and recent histories by producing a vast number of films that celebrated and commemorated their guerrilla struggles against fascism. These films ranged in scope and ambition from intimate psychological dramas to overblown military spectacles, from elegiac recollections to pure pulp fiction. Similar to Hollywood westerns, partisan films were the defining genre of the socialist film industry for a significant period. Moreover, in the late 60s and early 70s, both genres reinvented themselves and underwent a political revision that ended their respective “classical periods.” Despite being hugely successful in their domestic markets and often cinematically accomplished, many examples of the partisan films never traveled abroad, and most film prints today remain locked up and in dire need of preservation in various national film archives. Aside from a handful of canonical works, the majority of films we will screen have never been shown in the U.S.

Complexities of Resistance: Partisan Films from Eastern Europe and the Balkans Film Series presents a film screening of THE BELL TOLLS FOR THE BAREFOOTED (Zvony Pre Bosych)
Czechoslovakia [in Slovak], 1965. 96 minutes. 35mm print. Slovak Film Institute, Bratislava.
Directed by Stanislav Barabáš

on Saturday, February 17, 2024, 7:00 p.m.
Humanities Quadrangle, Screening Room L01
320 York Street, New Haven, CT 06511
Free and open to the public | All films will be shown with English subtitles

Stanislav Barabáš devoted a significant part of his career to representations of the Slovak National Uprising (August-October 1944). This film, the finest of his works about partisan struggle, depicts a singular quartet made up of two isolated and fearful partisans, a captured German soldier, and a woman whose encounters with the brutality of war have drained her life of all meaning.

Sponsors:
Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Program; European Studies Council; Whitney Humanities Center; Yale Film Archive; Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; and Film and Media Studies Program

About the Film Series: In the aftermath of World War II, several European states started reconstructing and reimagining their identities and recent histories by producing a vast number of films that celebrated and commemorated their guerrilla struggles against fascism. These films ranged in scope and ambition from intimate psychological dramas to overblown military spectacles, from elegiac recollections to pure pulp fiction. Similar to Hollywood westerns, partisan films were the defining genre of the socialist film industry for a significant period. Moreover, in the late 60s and early 70s, both genres reinvented themselves and underwent a political revision that ended their respective “classical periods.” Despite being hugely successful in their domestic markets and often cinematically accomplished, many examples of the partisan films never traveled abroad, and most film prints today remain locked up and in dire need of preservation in various national film archives. Aside from a handful of canonical works, the majority of films we will screen have never been shown in the U.S.