On Wednesday, September 16, 4:30-5:30 p.m. in Kaufman 221B, Dr. Natalia Starostina, Associate Professor of history at Oklahoma State University, will visit OU to deliver a lecture titled "Gendered Memories, Emotional Communities, and Affective Nostalgia in the Autobiographical Writing of Russian Émigré Women." Dr. Starostina is the author of more than twenty-five articles in publications such as Diasporas, Migrance, and Dialectical Anthropology. In her work, she focuses on imperialism, myth, memory, nostalgia, and migration in interwar Western Europe. Her talk at OU will argue that autobiographical writing allowed writers such as Nadezhda Teffi (1872-1952) and Maria Skotsova (1891-1945) to preserve a lost homeland in memory, reinterpret their past, and redefine themsleves within the transnational context of the Russian diaspora in France.
On Wednesday, October 7, 4:30-5:30 p.m. in 221B Kaufman Hall, Dr. Hilde Hoogenboom, Associate Professor of Russian at Arizona State University, will deliver a talk entitled: "The Quest for a Meaningful Life: Russian Noble Service Culture Revealed through Literary Markets, Women Writers, and Sentimentalism." Dr. Hoogenboom is the author of the monograph Noble Sentiments and the Rise of the Russian Novel: A European Literary History (University of Toronto, 2025), a study that uses digital humanities to analyze Russian and European publication data and show how Russia's nineteenth-century sentimental novelists, including women writers, adapted the European conversation about duty and moral education in their quest to understand themsleves and the challenges of their position as hereditary nobles in charge of 50 million serfs.
On Wednesday, October 28, 4:00-7:00 p.m. in Gaylord 1140, the Romanoff Center will host a special screening of the new documentary film Lyuba's Hope, which follows lawyer-activist Lyubov Sobol, formerly the head of Alexei Navalny's Anti-corruption Foundation, as she works for the democratization of Russia, first from within Russia and later in emigration. The film was directed by Marianna Yarovskaya, who will provide a video introduction to the film. After the film, Lyubov Sobol herself will particpate in a moderated discussion led by Dr. Hannah Chapman, the Theodore Romanoff Associate Professor of Russian Politics in OU's School of International Studies. This is a unique opportunity to hear in person from a leading political activist and to learn more about events in Russia today.
