On Monday, December 9th at 5pm the Russian Singing Concert will take place in the Niles Gallery in the Fine Arts Library. This event is free and open to the public. Russian Tea and Russian delicious food will be provided. 

Arai Takako is the author of previous poetry collections, including Tamashii dansu [Soul Dance] which won the 2008 Oguma Hideo Prize. Since 1998, she has been an editor for the poetry journal Mi’Te; she has also edited a volume of poems about, and is producing a film connected to, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan. Arai teaches Japanese and poetry at Saitama University. She is currently participating in the 2019 University of Iowa International Writing Program.

Professor Linkhoeva will present her research on colonial policies by the Soviet and Japanese regimes on the Mongolian territories (Buriatia, Outer and Inner Mongolia). The historiographical division between the communist bloc (Russia/Buriatia/Outer Mongolia/communist China) and the anticommunist bloc (Japan/Inner Mongolia/Manchuria/Republican China) has precluded identifying strategies and policies that great powers, regardless of their ideological preferences, deploy in dealing with “small people” caught in the regional power struggles. The talk shifts away from these national/ist perspectives and places compartmentalized experiences of the borderland people, the Buriat-Mongols, in the center of a history.

Dr. Tatiana Linkhoeva is Assistant Professor of Japanese History at New York University. Her forthcoming book, Revolution Goes East. Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism will be published by Cornell University Press in March 2020. 

Native of the republic of Buriatia (Russia), Dr. Linkhoeva graduated from Moscow State University, received her MA from the University of Tokyo, and PhD in History from UC Berkeley. She has been awarded fellowships from Japan’s Ministry of Education, the Japan Foundation, UC Berkeley, and the German Excellence Initiative.

MCLLC hosts a resume workshop for graduate students.

In this talk Dr. Rucker-Chang explores the uses and meanings of "Blackness" in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945-1992) and its successor states of Serbia and Montenegro. To reflect on the mechanisms of cultural and social incorporation of “Blacks” in Yugoslavia, she highlights how, in defiance to Yugoslav narratives of ethnic and racial inclusion, post-Yugoslav identity has adopted a normative ethnic value of  "whiteness" as an inalienable, exclusive feature of belonging.

Sunnie Rucker-Chang is an Assistant Professor of Slavic and East European Studies and Director of European Studies at University of Cincinnati. Her primary interests lie in cultural and racial formation(s) in the Balkans. She is a co-editor of and contributor to the book Chinese Migrants in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2011). Her work has appeared in the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Critical Romani Studies, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, and Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Her co-authored book, Roma Rights and US Civil Rights: A Transatlantic Approach, is currently in press with Cambridge University Press, and her co-edited volume Balkan Migrants: to, from, and in the Balkans: Identity, Alterity, and Culture is under contract with Liverpool University Press. For the 2019-2020 academic year Sunnie will work on her monograph focusing on racial formations and Blackness in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav space for which she has been awarded an American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowship.

Sponsored by the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Department of African American and Africana Studies, Department of History, International Studies, Department of Anthropology and the College of Arts and Sciences.

When Italian playwright/performer Dario Fo gave his Nobel Prize lecture in Stockholm in 1997, he distributed a 25-page booklet of drawings to audience members. Instead of following a prepared text, he delivered his speech impromptu, referring to the various sketches. In so doing, he demonstrated the art of improvisation in performance, a device essential to the Commedia dell’arte in Europe and to oral traditions around the world. Guest lecturer Antonio Scuderi will discuss the mechanisms of improvisation intuited by Fo and explicated by scholars of folklore.

Antonio Scuderi is Professor of Italian at Truman State University in Missouri, where he founded the Italian program. His interdisciplinary articles on Italian performance traditions have appeared in leading journals of theatre, folklore, and literary studies, among them Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Oral Tradition, and The Modern Language Review. He is the author of Dario Fo and Popular Performance; Dario Fo: Framing, Festival, and the Folkloric Imagination; and co-editor of Dario Fo: Stage, Text and Tradition. He has contributed essays to books, including The Cambridge History of Italian Theatre and The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell’Arte. He has recently edited Remembering the Consummate Playwright/Performer: Essays on Dario Fo, a collection of essays by young scholars.

"Understandings around “race”, religion, and ethnicity in foreign policy:  Ecuador's geopolitics against the Jewish community during World War II" by Maria Amelia Viteri, a visiting scholar at UK.



Dr. Maria Amelia Viteri holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from American University in Washington D.C., with a concentration on Race, Gender and Social Justice, a M.A. in Gender and Development, and a B.A. in Linguistics.  She's currently an Associate Professor and Senior Researcher of Anthropology at Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ), and a Visiting Scholar at University of Kentucky, Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics.