Undergraduate

The European & Russian Studies Community features Hiroaki Kuromiya, Emeritus Professor of History, Indiana University, Bloomington
The study of Soviet history is in a critical state, occasioned first by the Covid upheaval and then by Russia’s war against Ukraine. Access to critical sources of research (archives, libraries, organizations, and individuals) is restricted and is unlikely to improve. It may become even more difficult. Furthermore, Moscow sponsors and disseminates disinformation, both historical and contemporary, to muddy the historical waters. How to cope with this deplorable situation?
Topics to be discussed include the following:
1) Whether an “archival revolution” actually took place when the formerly closed archives and archival files began to open up in the-post Soviet era,
2) The current situation of access to the archives in some of the former Soviet republics,
3) The importance of non-Russian archives and the centrality of the archives Russia still holds,
4) Strategies to pursue in case archival access is blocked or restricted.
Lunch at 12:30 pm, seminar with Professor Kuromiya at 12:45 pm
Bio: Japanese-American historian, professor in the Department of History, University of Indiana, studies modern and contemporary Ukraine in a wider context of Eurasian history. He has written on the Donbas, historical and contemporary, the Holodomor, the Great Terror, and other subjects mainly during the Stalin era. His publications include books Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990s, The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s, and The Eurasian Triangle: Russia, the Caucasus, and Japan, 1904-1945 (with Georges Mamoulia), as well as numerous articles.

Zoom link: http://bit.ly/3uAEJla 

The Yale community is invited to hear the 2022 Yale World Fellows read and discuss the documentary play of Belarusian playwright and civil activist Andrei Kureichik. The play features 14 real monologues of Belarusians chosen from more than 700 stories of victims of Lukashenko’s repressive machine. In the play, politicians, journalists, activists, people of all ages and professions share their experience of political repression. This reading is an invitation to a broad discussion about the problem of political prisoners in the world and ways you can help.

Theodora Patrona teaches literary courses at the School of English of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki as special teaching fellow. She has published extensively on Greek American and Italian American literature and film, and regularly reviews for journals and sites abroad. Dr Patrona is the author of Return Narratives: Ethnic Space in Late Twentieth Century Greek American and Italian American Literature(Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017), and coeditor of Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation (Fordham University Press, 2022). Dr Patrona is currently working on two projects, co-editing a volume on the unchartered cultural contribution of Greek American women and another one on the concept of the father in Italian American culture.

Robert Braun, Assistant Professor, Sociology and Political Science, University of California - Berkeley
Professor Braun’s research focuses on civil society and intergroup relationships in times of social upheaval and has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, the Annual Review of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, the American Sociological Review, Theory and Society and Social Forces. His first book “Protectors of Pluralism” tries to explain why some local communities step up to protect victims of mass persecution while others refrain from doing so and is forthcoming at Cambridge University Press. his second book project, “Bogeymen”, traces the evolution of fear in Central Europe throughout the 19th and 20th century by studying the spread of frightful figures in children’s stories.

Professor Briggs is an expert on U.S. and international child welfare policy and on transnational and transracial adoption. Briggs’ most recent book, Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press, 2020), examines the 400-year-old history of the United States’ use of taking children from marginalized communities—from the taking of Black and Native children during America’s founding to the Donald Trump’s policy of family separation for Central American migrants and asylum seekers at the U.S./Mexico border—as a violent tool for political ends.