Yale Slavic Languages and Literatures

09/21/2026

Please join us on Wednesday, September 30th at 12pm in HQ 136 as we welcome Adrian Wanner to our Slavic and Eurasian Colloquium!

Dr. Adrian Wanner is a Distinguished Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Penn State University. His colloquium talk, "Writing Poetry Translingually: A Reconsideration of Karolina Pavlovna," considers the strategic stakes of translation and self-translation in the works of Russia's foremost female poet of the nineteenth century, as well as her own complicated relationship to Rusianness.

We hope to see you there!

09/17/2026

Please join us this semester for "Dropouts and Dreamers: Films of the Socialist 1980s"!

The series kicks off on Saturday, September 19th (at 7pm, in HQ L01) with COMING OUT (1989), an East German feature film about a young teacher named Philipp who gradually learns to accept his homosexuality. While Philipp attempts to be in a heterosexual relationship with his colleague Tanja, an encounter with a gay friend from the past pushes him to explore his repressed self. As he wanders through the gay bars of East Berlin, Philipp meets Matthias. This new relationship sets him on a difficult path toward liberating himself from internalized prejudice and accepting his sexual identity. Released on November 9, 1989 — the evening the Berlin Wall fell — COMING OUT became the first and last East German film to openly discuss homosexuality.

DCP | 1989 | directed by Heiner Carow | GDR | 113 minutes | German with English subtitles

No registration required. Post-screening discussion led by graduate students will follow.

Presented by The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

09/17/2026

Please join us on Wednesday, September 23rd in HQ 136 as we welcome Dr. Lindsay Ceballos to our first Slavic and Eurasian Colloquium of the year!

Dr. Lindsay Ceballos is an Associate Professor of Russian and East European Studies at Lafayette College. Her research focuses on the novels and cultural legacy of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the history of Russian poetry, and modernist literature, criticism, theater, and religious culture. She has held fellowships granted by ACLS and the Davis Center at Harvard University. Her first book, Reading Faithfully: Russian Modernist Criticism and the Making of Dostoevsky, 1881-1917, was published through Cornell University Press.

We hope to see you there!

09/15/2026

Please join us on Wednesdays at 12pm for this semester's Slavic and Eurasian Colloquium! Our first talk, by Professor Lindsay Ceballos, is next Wednesday, September 23rd in HQ 136. We hope to see you there!

09/11/2026

Please join us at 11:30 in HQ 136 as we welcome two distinguished colleagues from the University of Warsaw, Professors Joanna Piotrowska and Katarzyna Jakubowska-Krawczyk! We welcome this opportunity to learn about their research, and we hope to see you there!

09/10/2026

Please join us TONIGHT (Thursday, September 10) in HQ L01 (320 York) for this semester's first installment of Man of Vision: Andrzej Wajda Centenary Film Series at the Yale Film Archive.
Tonight's screenings will include:

7pm: A GENERATION (Andrzej Wajda, 1955, DCP, 87 mins)
In Nazi-occupied Warsaw, a reckless teen drifts from petty crime into the underground resistance, discovering purpose and first love amidst the brutality of war. Through restless camera movements and vivid location shooting, Wajda’s debut feature captures both the exhilaration and the terrible cost of political awakening, and introduces themes that would define his career: moral ambiguity, national identity, and the hard choices demanded by history. The opening salvo in one of cinema’s greatest trilogies. Introduction by Archer Neilson. In Polish with English subtitles

9 pm: KANAL
As the Warsaw Uprising collapses around them, exhausted resistance fighters attempt a desperate escape through the city’s sewer system, its dripping tunnels dissolving into a disorienting labyrinth of fear and endurance. “Wajda cuts through any official mythology of military discipline and honorable defeat” (Michael Sragow), crafting a visually imaginative war film stripped of triumph but suffused with humanity. Kanal shared the Jury Prize at Cannes with The Seventh Seal and established Wajda as one of postwar Europe’s essential filmmakers. Introduction by Archer Neilson. In Polish with English subtitles.

All screenings are free and open to the public. Check out the full series here: https://web.library.yale.edu/film/wajda100
We hope to see you there!

06/19/2025

We wanted to share the wonderful news that Katerina Clark has been awarded a Laura Shannon Prize Silver Medal for her last book, Eurasia without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons (Harvard UP, 2021). The prize was announced a day after her passing, sadly, but we can continue to take comfort and pride in her towering achievements and impact.

"Deeply researched and expertly written, Katerina Clark’s ‘Eurasia without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons 1919-1943’ is a path-breaking study of the Soviet ambition to create an international ‘leftist literary commons.’ Clark invites us to reimagine the territory of Modernist ‘world literature’ as she also raises significant questions about the political aims and consequences of literary forms. Russia’s turn to the East, with its mandate that Moscow remain the ‘center,’ here stands in dramatic contrast to the Paris and Berlin-located models of global republics of letters that have dominated Modernist studies. Clark narrates the ways earlier tenets of socialist realism were replaced by a broader set of aesthetic possibilities as the aim of anti-imperialism gave way to anti-fascism. In doing so, she enriches our sense of how an obligation to the representation of proletarian life famously came into tension with the formal ambitions of the radical avant-garde. She traces the complex networks and reciprocal relationships between internationalist literary figures as they promoted a left agenda, forging new audiences of South and East Asian, Soviet, and European readers. Throughout, Clark offers detailed and fully contextualized accounts of individual artists and individual works. To be cosmopolitan in this world meant not so much to take an urbane and high culture viewpoint, but to become familiar with, and represent, the worlds of the working class wherever they were found. With ‘Eurasia without Borders,’ Katerina Clark truly redraws the map of twentieth-century comparative literature.”

The Laura Shannon Prize, one of the preeminent prizes for European studies, is awarded each year to the best book that transcends a focus on any one country, state, or people to stimulate new ways of thinking about contemporary Europe as a whole. Read more about the prize and its recipients here: https://nanovic.nd.edu/news/nanovic-institute-awards-the-2024-laura-shannon-prize-to-ukrainian-studies-scholar-rory-finnin-for-book-on-poetics-of-solidarity-in-the-black-sea-region/

06/04/2025

Faculty research spotlight: Congratulations to Professor Claire Roosien on her latest publication! Her article "The Musical Teahouse: Yalla and the 'East' as Performance in Soviet Popular Culture" appears in Volume 83, Issue 4 of Slavic Review, now available through Cambridge Core.

This article examines the “East” as a performance practice in late Soviet culture through the case study of Yalla, arguably the most popular Central Asian band of the 1970s and 1980s and a hit performer across the entire socialist bloc and the Global South. It argues, first, that Yalla’s performance of the East changed over time, from the band’s origins in the Beatlemania of the early 1970s to the perestroika moment of nascent marketization; and, second, that the East functioned as an ambiguous category that evoked multiple resonances to multiple audiences and lent itself to a range of different political projects. Roosien concludes that Yalla’s performance of the East cannot be fully understood outside the material circumstances in which the band worked and the political world in which they functioned.

Read the full issue, including the critical forum on "Empire and Decolonization," at Cambridge Core: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/slavic-review/issue/250E719C27210BF45B88BB702950031A

05/23/2025

Interested in video games? Consider joining one of the Whitney Humanities Center working groups run by the members of our department.

Dismissed, mocked, feared or loved for decades, video games have become a staple of contemporary media, art, and popular culture, studied alongside traditional print media and film. They eclipse the global yearly revenue of both film and music industries combined, leaving their financial significance undeniable. What remains understudied, however, is the political and cultural significance of the medium. The Working Group in Video Game Studies offers a collaborative space for the intellectual and playful exploration of video games as aesthetic, technological, cultural, and political objects.

Several questions animate the founding of this working group: Why do video games matter? How do players “perform” various identities in games, and how might they resist or subvert expected performances? What themes and ideas are revealed uniquely, effectively, inadequately through the medium of video games? What are the political implications for the ideologies present in a video game given the globalized position of the medium? How do video games exist as one part of a much broader media and technology ecosystem, including their imbrication in the (post-)Cold War military-industrial-entertainment complex?

Video games must be studied as both crucially important technological and cultural objects, and we hope that this working group will mark only the start of more sustained efforts to take video games seriously at Yale and beyond.

https://whc.yale.edu/programs/working-groups/video-game-studies

05/21/2025

Graduate research spotlight: Earlier this year, our PhD candidate Liliya Dashevski published a piece on the website of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was previously a Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of Drawings and Prints.

In this article, Liliya takes a closer look at the historic paper dolls from the Met's Drawings and Prints collection and traces the story of conspicuous consumption and evolving social values.

Read Liliya's contribution below!

Historic paper dolls from the Drawings and Prints collection tell a story of conspicuous consumption and evolving social values.