16 December at 18.00 in the Golden Hall, Anika Walke (Washington University in St. Louis) will present at a joint meeting of the interdisciplinary seminar “Eurasia without Borders” and the Anthropology Department’s seminar “Transnationalism and Migration Studies.” The presentation will be in English, followed by discussion in Russian and English.
Between 1958 and the late 1980s, students from the so-called developing world were trained in Soviet universities, in Moscow and Leningrad as much as in Tashkent and Kharkiv. Students benefited from the ambitions of the Soviet government to expand its influence in newly independent, post-colonial states, but also struggled with the everyday reality of Soviet society. Confrontations occurred around the lack of resources or equipment, privileges for foreign students that set them apart from Soviet students, social control in dorms and classrooms, and political disagreements. The research project draws on archival documentation and personal accounts of alumni, both Soviet and foreign, to analyze internationalist solidarity in the form of academic exchange against the backdrop of increasing tensions and crises in late Soviet society.
Anika Walke, Ph.D., is assistant professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Walke was educated at the University of Oldenburg (Germany) and the State University of St. Petersburg (Russia), before she completed her doctorate at the University of California-Santa Cruz.
Walke’s research and teaching interests include war memory, migration, and nationality policies in the (former) Soviet Union and Europe, and she has published several articles on oral history and memory in the former USSR and Jewish resistance in Nazi ghettos in Belorussia. Her book, Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia (Oxford University Press, 2015), weaves together oral histories, video testimonies, and memoirs to show how the first generation of Soviet Jews experienced the Nazi genocide and how they remember it after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
Contact: (812) 386-76-34