IMARES Workshop: 10 Years that Shook My World. Being There, My Story...1985-1995
Speaker: Marina Albee
Platform: Zoom https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAtfu2sqTwiHdzQIWlciKV5SQWXhcgU7tr6
Marina Albee was a Ph.D. student at The Harriman Institute at Columbia University in NYC in 1985. She decided to go there because of dynamic professor Jonathan Sanders, who had organized the construction of an antenna on the roof of the Institute to watch Soviet television. The project was called "Jonathan's Folly" because no one thought it would ever work.
Some students started watching Channel 1 every day at 3 pm EST when the Molniya satellite shifted its position to be visible from the roof. Marina began to study the Soviet Union through its television and Mikhail Gorbachov's USSR was changing it every day. She started to work writing TV Guides and special curriculum for students of Soviet TV. Later, the inventor of the system went on her tour to Moscow and she accompanied him to Gosteleradio.
This led to a career spanning 30 years, doing things from live satellite TV, to TV and film production, to music production, to telecom servicing of oil and gas and other foreign corporations in the Former Soviet Union. In 1996, she moved permanently from Moscow to St. Petersburg where she continues to consult. She taught for 10 years at SpbGU in the Philological Faculty, in the Department called Intercultural Communications and Linguistics, and subsequently has taught at Herzen University, the Higher School of Economics, and now teaches at the European University at St. Petersburg.