Epidemics and Contagion in Slavic and East European Studies Symposium

Friday, March 3

8 a.m.
Breakfast (KTSA 205)

8:30-10:30 a.m.
Panel 1: Epidemic Control and the Power Game: From Pre-Modern Times to Perestroika
(KTSA 205)

10-30-10:45 a.m.
Coffee Break

10:45 a.m.-12:45 p.m.
Panel 2: Epidemic Morality and the Healthy Self (KTSA 205)

1-1:45 p.m.
Lunch (KRJH Upper Commons)

2-4 p.m.
Panel 3: Contagion and the Monstrous Other (KTSA 205)

6 p.m. 
Keynote
Alfred Thomas (University of Illinois at Chicago), “The Brown Plague and the White Sickness: Politics as Plague in Karel Capek’s Bila Nemoc and Albert Camus’ La Peste” (Red Pit - KRJH 127)

7 p.m.
Dinner (Off Campus)

Saturday, March 4

8 a.m.
Breakfast (KTSA 205)

8:30-10:30 a.m.
Panel 4: Contagious Minds (KTSA 205)

10:30-10:45 a.m.
Coffee Break

10:45 a.m.-12:45 p.m.
Panel 5: Epidemics in Contemporary Russian Literature (KTSA 205)

1-1:45 p.m.
Lunch (Sadove Conference Room)

2 p.m.
Wellin Museum Tour
Wellin Website

Panel 1: Epidemic Control and the Power Game: From Pre-Modern Times to Perestroika 

Discussant: Mackenzie Cooley (Hamilton College)

*Uladzimir Padalinski (Belarusian State University), “The General Sejm of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of 1572: Epidemic, Power, and Money”

John Davis (Hopkinsville Community College), “The ‘Epidemic’ in History: Rethinking Little Ice Age Russia” 

Irina Roldugina (University of Pittsburgh), “HIV/AIDS and Perestroika”

Panel 2: Epidemic Morality and the Healthy Self

Discussant: Amy Koenig (Hamilton College)

Natalia Vygovskaia (Brown University), “Veresaev’s Story Bez Doroghi: Medical Morality in the Cholera Epidemic of the 1890s”

*Cotoi Calin (University of Bucharest), “Cholera in Nineteenth Century Romania: From “Health to All” to Demographic Antisemitism”

Maria Vyatchina (Tartu University), “Gender, Body, and Race in the Early Soviet Anti-trachoma Campaign”

Panel 3: Contagion and the Monstrous Other

Discussant: Sabrina Datoo (Hamilton College)

*Dmytro Yesypenko (University of Alberta), “Ivan Franko and His Vampires: "Others" and Subaltern in the Writer's Epidemic Fiction”

LeiAnna X. Hamel (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), “Contagion and Disintegration in Late Imperial Russia: The Syphilitic Sex Worker in Alexander Kuprin’s The Pit”

José Alaniz (University of Washington), “Joseph Bolf and the Eastern European ‘Zombie’”

Panel 4: Contagious Minds

Discussant: Marianne Janack (Hamilton College)

Giulia Dossi (Hamilton College), “Nineteenth Century Shriekers and Contagious Hysteria”

*Natalia Borisova (University of Tuebingen), “Mental Contagion: Mind Cure’s Paramedical Practices and Lev Tolstoys' Theory of Moral Health” 

Dylan Mohr (University of Minnesota), "’Individuals of Abnormal Psychology’: The Discourses of Psychological Contagion and Former Prisoners of War in Post-WWI Eastern Europe”

Panel 5: Epidemics in Contemporary Russian Literature 

Discussant: Onno Oerlemans (Hamilton College)

Nataliya Karageorgos (Wesleyan University), “The Flu in Contemporary Russian Literature”

Tetyana Dzyadevych (Harvard University), “Russian Intelligentsia: Importance or Impotence in Facing the Pandemic. Vladimir Sorokin’s The Blizzard and Victor Pelevin’s iPhuck-10”

Julia Vaingurt (University of Illinois at Chicago), “Immunity and Community in Vladimir Sorokin's The Blizzard (2010) and Eduard Verkin's Sakhalin Island (2018).”

Matt Kendall (University of Illinois at Chicago), “‘Reading’ Pathologic 2: Russian Literature as a Trans-Medial Idea”

* asterisked panelists will participate remotely