American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC) Georgia Branch organizes a public talk on
Assemblages of Collapse: The Affective World of Parajanov
and the Fall of the Soviet Empire
By Dr. Leah Feldman, University of Chicago, ARISC Fellow
Date: June 25, 18:00
Venue: Ilia State University, room G106
Address: 1 G. Tsereteli St. Tbilisi, Georgia
Leah Feldman is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. Her research explores the poetics and the politics of global literary and cultural entanglements, focusing critical approaches to translation theory, semiotics, Marxist aesthetics, affect and decolonial theory, which traverse the Caucasus and Central Asia. Her book On the Threshold of Eurasia: Orientalism and Revolutionary Aesthetics in the Caucasus (Cornell UP, 2018) exposes the ways in which the idea of a revolutionary Eurasia informed the interplay between orientalist and anti-imperial discourses in Russian and Azeri poetry and prose. Tracing translations and intertextual engagements across Russia, the Caucasus and western Europe, it offers an alternative vision of empire, modernity and anti-imperialism from the vantage point of cosmopolitan centers in the Russian empire and Soviet Union. Her current research interests include affect in late-Soviet film, art and performance from Central Asia and the Caucasus from the 70s to present, as well as a study of the rise of the global New Right in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe and Eurasia, for which she is preparing a special issue in the journal Boundary 2.
Funding for this fellowship is provided by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs through a grant to the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC).
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ARISC is an American Overseas Research Center, an independent not-for-profit, that supports research in and about Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, both in the South Caucasus and the US. A member of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC), ARISC offers fellowships, programming and research support. ARISC does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, physical or mental disability, medical condition, ancestry, marital status, age, sexual orientation, citizenship, or status as a covered veteran.