Slavic Graduate Student Association - SGSA

Between Memorial & Remembrance: Plaszow | illinihillel The ruins of Plaszow, the forgotten Holocaust concentration camp, currently serve as a community park in the outskirts of Krakow, Poland. Join archaeologist Kamil Karski and historian Karlina Ozog as they uncover 70 year old stories and commemorate the atrocities that happened there.

Karolina Ozog works on Jewish historical sites at the Historical Museum of the City of Kraków. Recently, she has been working with her colleagues to memorialize Concentration Camp Plaszow, located in a southern suburb of Kraków on the grounds of two former Jewish cemeteries. Between October 1942 and January 1945, more than 30,k000 people were imprisoned there and approximately 5,000 were murdered. After World War II, the territory was not commemorated and remained an unfenced, open public space. At the moment, it serves as local park and is taken over by ubiquitous nature and social leisure activities. The Historical Museum of the City of Krakow is currently engaged in a large-scale project to commemorate the entire site while maintaining free entry. In this presentation, Ms. Ozog will discuss how sound is being utilized in the development of the memorial site. She will explain how and why visitors to Plaszow will be invited to listen to auditory components that include historical music as well as ambient sounds related to the physical attributes of the site.

November 9, 2020
12-1:00 pm
registration required
https://bit.ly/plazsowworkshop
free and open to the public

ICYMI - join us for IGI Fall 2020 Career Day on Oct. 23! Current and recent graduate students are invited to a career diversity day focusing on using foreign language, area studies, and thematic studies in the job market. To register, please visit igi.illinois.edu/career-day

Please join us on Thursday, September 17th, at 4 PM CST on Zoom for our first REEEC New Directions Lecture of the academic year. Emily Wang (Assistant Professor of Russian, University of Notre Dame) and Korey Garibaldi (Assistant Professor of American Studies, University of Notre Dame) will give a lecture entitled "Interrogating the Declining Significance of Pushkin's Blackness: Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, and Literary Nationalism". Though most scholarship on Pushkin’s reception in the United States focuses on twentieth-century African American literature, the origins of this encounter remain poorly understood. In fact, nineteenth-century commentators on both sides of the Atlantic were obsessed with Pushkin’s racial heritage—as both a Russian, and as a canonical European writer of African descent. This collaborative lecture (presented by a transatlantic historian of race and a Slavist) brings together little-remembered newspaper records, personal correspondence, and others texts—from the mid-1830s onwards—to recover how Pushkin was regarded as a black intellectual. For Zoom meeting information, please register at https://go.illinois.edu/wang-garibaldi-lecture

Today! Please join us for this important discussion!

Please join us on Sept. 3, 4:00 PM CST on Zoom, for our Fall Kickoff Event: "Race and Racism in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies: A Roundtable." We invite you to join a discussion on the role of race and racism in our region and scholarly field. What can perspectives drawn from our region offer current discussions about the study of race and systemic racism, in the US and elsewhere? What role have race and racism played in the constitution of our field, and what can we do about that? One goal of this session is to help formulate new initiatives and lines of inquiry that can shape the future of our program and the larger field of REEES going forward. For Zoom meeting information, please contact REEEC at [email protected]