General Public

Extensive disruption and destruction of the everyday lives of civilian populations, often including deprivation of basic physiological and psychological human needs, is a deliberate feature of many forms of political violence. Leena Käosaar will focus on written records - life stories, diaries, and letters - of Stalinist mass deportations from the Baltic States and written life narratives of Ukrainian war refugees in Estonia to discuss how the experience of adversity is narrated via an emphasis on radical change, distortion, and, in most severe cases, almost complete erosion of the everyday. At the same time, the (re)creation of the everyday emerges in the records and narratives as a central means of building resilience and coping with the experience.

Leena Käosaar is the Juris Padegs Postdoctoral Associate for the Baltic Studies Program and an Associate Professor of Cultural Theory at the Institute of Cultural Research at the University of Tartu in Estonia. Her research interests include Baltic women’s deportation and Gulag narratives, women’s diaries and family correspondences, self-representational writing of traumatic experience, relationality, memory, and mobility/the mobility of memory. Since the spring of 2022, she has focused, within the framework of the project “Taking Shelter in Estonia: the Stories of Ukrainians Fleeing from the War,” on collecting the life stories of Ukrainian refugees in Estonia.

Please join us for a lunchtime talk with Institute of Sacred Music fellow, Dr. Samantha Slaubaugh. Since lunch is included, RSVP to raymond.vogel@yale.edu by Monday, November 6, 2023.

Note: Seating capacity is limited and will be given on a first-come, first-served basis.

In the thirteenth century, communities of women called “beguines” flourished throughout Europe. These lay women were not consecrated religious and yet, they often looked and acted like those in a religious order. Despite the intense interest in late medieval beguines in the previous decades, a major barrier has prevented a thorough understanding of their liturgical practices: a lack of liturgical manuscripts from beguine communities. This dearth of evidence means that little is known to us about their lives of prayer. Despite this lacuna, scholars have long recognized the centrality of liturgical practice to beguine spirituality, especially as seen in mystical and hagiographic texts written by or about beguines.

Evidence for the liturgical practices of a beguine community is front and center, however, in the hagiographic text for Douceline of Digne (d. 1274) left by Las donnas de Robaut (the Women of Roubaud), the self-titled beguine women in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Provence. This Old Occitan hagiography, likely written by a member or members of the beguine community, narrates the story of the founder of the beguines of Roubaud, Douceline of Digne, and her ecstatic raptures and levitations. This talk will provide an introduction to my current book project, The Practice of Ecstasy: Liturgical Formation for the Beguines of Roubaud, which analyzes this hagiography as a liturgical guide, one which was likely used to train novices in a liturgical ideal for the beguine community. Drawing on one chapter from the book, which investigates the narratives of Douceline’s ecstasies on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, I will demonstrate how the raptures of this holy woman modeled liturgical leadership and the practice of joy that appropriately celebrates the assumption of the Virgin Mary. By levitating, Douceline performs the Assumption as the Virgin Mary, modeling the imitatio Mariae the beguines were encouraged to embrace. By singing the office with great joy, Douceline performs the appropriate emotion for the feast. By doing all of this among Franciscan friars, Douceline exerts liturgical leadership that is supported by her local community.

Samantha Slaubaugh received her PhD in Theology at the University of Notre Dame, where she specialized in Liturgical Studies. As a liturgical scholar, she focuses primarily on the Latin Middle Ages. Her research explores the connections between the liturgy and experiences of ecstasy or mystical union with God. She is particularly interested in the practices of medieval beguines and other lay women. She is currently a fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

Complexities of Resistance: Partisan Films from Eastern Europe and the Balkans Film Series presents a film screening of KANAL (Kanał)
Poland, 1957. 91 minutes
Directed by Andrzej Wajda. 35mm print. Print Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum. Janus Films/Polart.
on Saturday, December 9, 2023, 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

The earliest film made about the Warsaw Uprising, KANAL is doubtless the best-known of the partisan films to be shown during the fall segment of our series. The second film (following A GENERATION (1955) and ASHES AND DIAMONDS (1958)) of Wajda’s war trilogy, this stunningly shot work raises still-burning questions about the relationship between private and political life during wartime, and about how the Uprising has been narrated as a historical event. Presented by Krystyna Iłłakowicz, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale University

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.

Join us in Yale School of Music’s Sprague Hall for The Yale Voxtet’s fall concert, “The Spirit of France.” The Voxtet will be joined by guest ensemble, The Sebastians. The program includes:

Charpentier’s Couronne de fleurs, H 486
Purcell’s Ye tuneful muses, Z 344
Lully’s Regina coeli from Petits motets, LWV 77/12

The concert is free and open to the public.

The Yale Voxtet are students of Yale professor James Taylor and are candidates for graduate degrees in voice. The select group of eight singers specializes in early music, oratorio, and chamber ensemble. In addition to performing a variety of chamber music programs each year, the group sings, tours, and records as part of Yale Schola Cantorum.

The Sebastians are a dynamic and vital musical ensemble specializing in music of the baroque and classical eras. Lauded as “everywhere sharp-edged and engaging” (The New York Times), the Sebastians have also been praised for their “well-thought-out articulation and phrasing” (Early Music Review) and “elegant string playing… immaculate in tuning and balance” (Early Music Today). I Care If You Listen praised the ensemble’s “beautifully-nuanced playing and thoughtful expressivity” in their début album, calling the recording a “technical and timbral tour-de-force.”

And yet evil exists: a Crisis of Love and writing through War
Conversation with Marci Shore and Iya Kiva with poetry readings

Reception to follow.

Iya Kiva (b. 1984) is a Ukrainian poet and translator. Born and raised in Donetsk, she fled the war in 2014 and settled in Kyiv. There she began to shift from writing in her native Russian to writing in Ukrainian. She is the author of two volumes of poetry and the recipient of numerous awards for her poetry and translation. This autumn of 2023 she spent as a fellow at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. A bilingual collection of Iya’s poetry, translated by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk is forthcoming with Harvard University Press.

The format will be a combination bi/multilingual poetry reading and a conversation with Marci Shore about the existence of evil, the problem of responsibility, the crisis of love and the meaning of writing in the midst of war–as the rest of the world goes about business as usual.

Some links to her poetry in English translation:
https://lithub.com/war-plants-paper-flowers-new-ukrainian-poetry-by-iya-…
https://lithub.com/february-get-the-ink-and-weep-contemporary-poetry-fro…
https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/ukrainian-poems-of-war-khersonsk…
https://www.thewhitereview.org/poetry/four-poems-iya-kiva/