The Early Slavic Studies Association is a scholarly, non-profit organization dedicated to fostering closer worldwide communication among scholars interested in pre-eighteenth century Slavic studies; and to promoting the dissemination of scholarly information on early Slavic studies through the organization of meetings and conferences and through the Association's newsletter.
To become a member and to pay annual membership dues, please go to the Membership page.
The Museum of Russian Icons offers a unique opportunity to play an important role in shaping a leading institute for icons and Eastern Christian art in the USA. The Museum is currently in the last phase of a reorientation and rebranding project, and its new plans will be shared with the public in the second half of 2023. The curator will also spearhead the Study Center which will be an essential part of the new Museum.
The Museum seeks a dynamic and highly motivated individual who is excited by this challenge. The ideal candidate will be an experienced, published scholar passionately interested in the arts of the Eastern Christian world, and deeply committed to the Museum's mission. The ideal candidate should be fully able to employ the latest technologies to connect to global audiences. The candidate reports to and works closely with the Executive Director.
The Museum of Russian Icons, founded in 2006 by the American entrepreneur Gordon Lankton, holds the most comprehensive collection of Russian icons in the US, as well as a growing collection of Greek, Veneto-Cretan, and Ethiopian icons. The Museum serves as a place for contemplation and for experiencing the beauty and spirituality of icons. The permanent collection and temporary exhibitions offer unparalleled opportunities to situate Eastern Christian art within a global context and to explore its connection to contemporary concerns and ideas. The Museum’s Study Center stimulates object-based learning and multidisciplinary research and aims to share its research in the field of Eastern Christian art with wide audiences through an active slate of academic and public programs.
Essential Functions and Responsibilities: • Maintain and care for the collections. • Research, propose, and organize high-level exhibitions. • Develop and lead the Study Center, including the library, in collaboration with the Executive Director. • Organize and moderate conferences and lectures, online and in person. • Publish proceedings of conferences on the website and act as key author for online content. • Collaborate with Executive Director to refine collections through acquisitions and de-accessioning. • Maintain extensive contacts with curators, scholars, donors, collectors, dealers, and consultants. • Work closely with Registrar, restorers, contractors, and others participating in art installations. • Work with marketing staff to generate publicity for exhibitions and initiatives. • Oversee the galleries, including related signage, labels, and printed and online museum publications. • Deliver talks on the permanent collection and special projects or exhibitions.
Experience and Skills: • Excellent interpersonal and communication skills. • Minimum of three years of museum or institutional experience. • Proven record of scholarly research and publishing in area(s) of specialty. • Proven ability to execute complex projects, preferably exhibitions or other public-facing initiatives. • Strong computer skills and an interest in contributing to the Museum’s social media platforms. • Superior ability to present ideas and projects. • Strong planning and project management skills. • Able to directly engage with diversity, equity, access, and inclusion (DEAI) initiatives at the Museum.
Education: PhD in art history or equivalent through publications with a focus on icons and Eastern Christian art.
Personal Qualities: • Result-driven • Intellectually rigorous • Creative and innovative • Inspirational, passionate, curious • Generous and collaborative team worker • Possessing superior judgment, discretion, tact, and diplomacy
Staff Position Full Time, 40 hours per week (part-time may be considered)
Salary Range $80,000–$95,000 (with extensive benefits)
Working conditions: Hybrid (at the Museum in Clinton MA and remote). Flexible hours.
How to Apply: Please send your application incl. a letter of interest, a resume, and names of 3 references to Simon Morsink, Executive Director: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. No phone calls please.
Consideration of candidates will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled.
The Early Slavic Studies Association (ESSA) announces its prize for the best book in the field of Early Slavic Studies for 2023. Books published between September 1, 2021 and August 31, 2023 will be eligible for the award. The prize committee is also willing to consider a special award for best translation of primary source material in the field, to be awarded at the committee's discretion.
All nominated works must be in English. The committee will accept both nominations and self-nominations. Authors must be members of ESSA in good standing. Please contact our secretary, Ashley Morse here to confirm your eligibility. All nominations should be sent to the chair of the prize committee, Maria Grazia Bartolini (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), by Sunday, September 24, 2023.
The Graduate Student Travel Award Committee of the Early Slavic Studies Association is seeking applications for a $300 grant to assist with the travel expenses of a graduate student who will be presenting a paper in person in the early Slavic field at the National Convention of the ASEEES in Philadelphia in November/December 2023. Interested graduate students may find the application here and submit it with a c.v. by e-mail to the committee chair, Tomasz Grusiecki <tomaszgrusiecki[at]boisestate.edu>, by July 30. The winner will be notified by August 15.
The Early Slavic Studies Association calls for proposals for a sponsored panel at the 2023 ASEEES convention in Philadelphia. The panel papers may be in any discipline, and the panelists do not need to be ESSA members to be considered for sponsorship. The panel may be part of either the virtual or in-person conference.
If you would like your panel proposal to be considered for ESSA sponsorship, please send your proposal to soldat[at]soldatkuepper.de by Thursday, March 1st. Please make sure to specify whether you want the panel to be scheduled for the in-person or virtual convention.
The decision will be announced before the ESSA sends the winning panel proposal to ASEEES by the submission deadline on March 15. Information on the deadlines, themes, and panel proposal rules for ASEEES 2023 can be found at https://www.aseees.org/convention.
Only one panel can be sponsored by each ASEEES affiliate organization. ESSA sponsorship will guarantee acceptance of the panel at ASEEES. We look forward to receiving your proposals. Please feel free to contact Cornelia Soldat if you have any questions about this call.
With best wishes,
Cornelia Soldat President, Early Slavic Studies Association
The winner of this years' article prize is Mirela Ivanova's article "Inventing and ethnicising Slavonic in the long ninth century", in Journal of Medieval History 47,4-5 (2021).
Mirela Ivanova's "Inventing and Ethnicising Slavonic in the Long Ninth Century" puts forward a fresh argument based on careful theoretical consideration and detailed historical reflection. Using the "ideological model of literacy" that was developed by the most recent scholarship on literacy studies, the article challenges the ethnodriven model found in most accounts of the invention of Slavonic, showing that the ethnicity of Slavonic does not emerge in the earliest accounts of the alphabet's creation and that the invention myth is cast in new, ethnicized light only in the Life of Methodios, mainly as a response to the crisis in episcopal authority and papal patronage faced by the Methodian milieu. In integrating the invention of Slavonic into broader sociopolitical and intellectual praxis, Ivanova makes a precious contribution to our field in the broadest possible sense. The work is interdisciplinary and innovative and makes a clear intervention into existent historiography, chiming in on a topical issue in Early Slavic Studies and indeed in Slavic Studies more generally.
Honorable Mention
Tomasz Grusiecki’s article, “Close Others: Poles in the Visual Imaginary of Early Modern Amsterdam”, uses visual materials depicting Polish people and costume to engage with theoretical ideas about exoticism and Otherness. The work applies Piotrowski’s idea of the “close other” to shed light on Western European attitudes towards Poles in the early modern period. Grusiecki writes eloquently and deploys critical theory with precision. Drawing on fresh materials, he contests convincingly binary theories of cultural difference. Overall, the article not only produces a series of engaging close analyses of visual sources, but it also crafts a nuanced argument that has broad cross-cultural significance.
The Famous Early Slavic Dinner take place after the meeting, at 8:30 – 10 pm, at the Frontera Grill restaurant. (445 North Clark Street – can be reached on foot or by metro at "Grand" subway station).
The cost of the 3-course dinner is $80+tax, not including the drinks, which you can order directly at the table.
If you would like to attend the Dinner, please send a message to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., by Wednesday, November 9.
Not only members are invited to visit the dinner - let your friends, partners, or colleagues join it, too.
Languages of the Non-human in Early Modern Muscovy and Poland- Lithuania 1:00 to 2:45pm CST (9:00 to 10:45pm EET), The Palmer House Hilton, Floor: 7th Floor, LaSalle 3 Our panel discusses how the fluidity of the boundaries between the human and the non-human was conceptualized in the early modern Slavic world. By choosing the primary sources from early modern Muscovy, Poland and Ukraine, we aim at presenting the ways in which the interactions between the human world and the world of gods, the world of animals, and the world of demons were depicted, analyzed and employed. At the same time, we show that the portrayal of such interactions by sixteenth and seventeenth century intellectuals was conceived as exploration of the human condition in the inequitable social order and in the times of uncertainty and precarity, which ultimately meant addressing and questioning the limitations, vulnerability, and liminality of the human. Chair: Valerie Ann Kivelson (U of Michigan) Papers: Elena Boeck (DePaul U), Intersecting Worlds: Managing Human- Divine Communications in the Trojan Illustrations of the Litsevoi Letopisnyi Svod; Tom Grusiecki (Boise State U), Can the Wolf Speak?: Dumb Peasants, Articulate Animals, and the Polish Aesop (1578); Maria Ivanova (McGill U, Canada), The Language the Devil Speaks Discussant: Simon Franklin, (U of Cambridge, UK)
Thursday, November 10, 2022
A Journey out of Precarity: New Perspectives on the Ukrainian Literary, Religious, and Social Culture of the Mazepa Era (1687–1708) 3:15 to 5:00pm CST (Thu, November 10, 11:15pm to Fri, November 11, 1:00am EET), The Palmer House Hilton, Floor: 7th Floor, LaSalle 3 This panel brings together historians and literary scholars to explore the dynamic intellectual and social history of the Ukrainian Hetmanate under the rule of Ivan Mazepa. Drawing from a multidisciplinary range of sources, including hagiographic texts, panegyrics, and civil documents, we aim to show the ways in which Ukrainian intellectuals in the late seventeenth-century Hetmanate sought stability despite an environment both politically and socially unstable. The first paper explores the new and prominent role of the Song of Songs in the religious discourse of seventeenthcentury Ukraine, showing that the popularity of this Biblical book may have prepared the way for the concept of the saint’s mystic marriage to Christ – an idea of Western import that, until that point, did not feature as a part of East Slavic Orthodox theology. This paper argues that a legal and theological rethinking of marriage encouraged the use of the marriage metaphor, one with emotional and psychological appeal during unstable times. The second paper explores how feelings of love, friendship, and mentorship were creatively constructed through complex poetic forms that helped Ukrainian intellectuals respond to an age of crisis. In addition, it examines the role of poetry as a privileged means of communication between members of the intellectual elite in the Hetmanate. The third paper focuses on the impact of Ivan Mazepa’s educational and cultural policies on the Russian Empire and explores Ukrainian intellectuals’ quest for stability along the porous borders between Ukrainian Orthodoxy and Russian imperial culture. Chair: Maria Ivanova, (McGill U, Canada) Papers: Maria Grazia Bartolini (U of Milan, Italy), 'I Gave My Consent to Marry Christ': Dmytryi Tuptalo’s Life of Saint Agnes, the Language of Affect, and Bridal Self-imaging in Early Modern Ukraine; Jakub Niedzwiedz (Jagiellonian U, Poland), How Did Stefan Iavors’kyi Construct His Love for Barlaam Iasins’kyi in His Panegryric 'The Fullness of Never Decreasing Glory' (Pełnia nieubywającej chwały, 1691)?; Tatiana Tairova-Yakovleva (St Petersburg State U, Russia), Mazepa's Policy and Peter's Church Reform Discussant: Giovanna Brogi (U of Milan, Italy)
Thursday, November 10, 2022
Facing the East, Facing the West: Knowledge Transfer and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Eastern Europe 3:15 to 5:00pm CST (Thu, November 10, 11:15pm to Fri, November 11, 1:00am EET), The Palmer House Hilton, Floor: 7th Floor, Sandburg 2
The early modern era was a time of diverse encounters for the lands and people throughout the world. In Eastern Europe, it was an era of migration of ideas, knowledge, books, and people, that contributed to the far-reaching contacts between the global East and the West. This panel is devoted to the region of Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its reception and use of Western and Eastern knowledge (broadly defined) and culture. We provide a perspective on early modern Eastern Europe and its cultural entanglements from diverse thematic (philosophy, education, diplomacy, “sciences”) and regional (Poland, Lithuania, Muscovy) angles and engage in a broader conversation on cultural differences and knowledge in this period. The panelists look specifically at humanistic thought, noble library collections, intellectual tastes, and baroque cuisine, reflecting some of the most recent research trends on the region, its history, and culture. Chair: Olenka Z. Pevny (U of Cambridge, UK) Papers: Karolina Grzybczak (Jagiellonian U, Poland), The Polish Reception of European Dispute on Free Will in the 16th Century: Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski's Libri tres; Oleksii Rudenko (Central European U Vienna, Austria), Laboratories of Knowledge and History-Writing: Aristocratic Libraries in the Sixteenth-Century Grand Duchy of Lithuania; Stefan Schneck (U of Zürich, Switzerland), How to Write a Bestseller in Moscow in the 17th Century?; Ewelina Sikora (Central European U, Hungary), Taste(s) of Poland-Lithuania in the 17th Century Discussant: Barbara J. Skinner (Indiana State U)
Friday, November 11, 2022
The Legacies of Nikon’s Patriarchate (1652-1666) 10:15am to 12:00pm CST (6:15 to 8:00pm EET), The Palmer House Hilton, Floor: 7th Floor, LaSalle 3 Nikon has been controversial since his own time for effecting what became Russia’s lasting ritual reforms, as well as for his pride of office. His concrete effects were the subject of a 2021 ASEEES Virtual Convention panel initiating work on a collective volume, which two speakers on this roundtable are spearheading. The formal presentations there examined only three specific aspects: a) his relevance for Russia’s last pre-modern patriarch Adrian; b) Peter the Great’s retention of Nikonian military16 religious rituals; and c) Old Believer mass suicides. The current roundtable will, as if a preliminary to a workshop, explore a much wider range of other subjects which merit inclusion in the collective volume and will invite active participation from the audience. Such brainstorming at AAASS/ASEEES conventions has worked in the past for this type of collective project. The speakers themselves have researched specifically the rituals Nikon promoted, the monasteries he founded, his domestic ideology, his foreign policy goals, his impact abroad in the Orthodox Balkans and the Greek patriarchates, the writings attributed to the most famous Old Believer leader, and the locus of the most serious violent Old Believer rebellion. They intend to go well beyond these issues in their presentations. Chair: David Goldfrank (Georgetown U) Roundtable Members: Priscilla Hart Hunt (U of Massachusetts Amherst), Kevin Michael Kain (U of Wisconsin-Green Bay), Ovidiu Olar (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria), Roy Raymond Robson (Pennsylvania State U)
Friday, November 11, 2022
Of Myths and Men: Precarity of Memory in Sixteenth-century Muscovy 2:00 to 3:45pm CST (10:00 to 11:45pm EET), The Palmer House Hilton, Floor: 7th Floor, LaSalle 3 This round table discusses comparative construction of royal authority in the Litsevoi Letopisnyi Svod produced at the court of Ivan IV. Taking as examples a fictional ruler (Trojan Priam), a historical legend (Alexander the Great), and a historical conundrum (Ivan IV), the contributors discuss how medieval East Slavic narratives imaginatively represented royal power, court culture and charismatic authority. Priam, Alexander, and Ivan IV became didactic examples, whose deeds were deemed worthy to live on in memory at the Muscovite court. The contributors to the round table illuminate dynamic complexities of intellectual discourse on the boundaries of authority in the East Slavic world. Chair: Justin Willson (Princeton U) Roundtable Members: Brian James Boeck (DePaul U), Elena Boeck (DePaul U), Susana Torres Prieto (IE U, Spain)
Friday, November 11, 2022
Language, Tradition, and Authority in the Pre-modern Slavic World 2:00 to 3:45pm CST (10:00 to 11:45pm EET), The Palmer House Hilton, Floor: 7th Floor, Sandburg 2 This panel will trace the intersections between textual tradition and forms of authority—political, legal, spiritual—in the pre-modern Slavic world. Spanning the Kyivan, Mongol and Muscovite periods of Rus’ history, the papers presented here highlight the mutually constructive possibilities of macro and micro analyses: on the one hand, how the language of surviving texts can be understood as a vector of cross17 cultural political change, grounded in either Byzantine or Mongol models; on the other, how texts themselves were the site of contested notions of spiritual authority, to either buttress prevailing norms (in the case of liturgical poetry) or to challenge them (in the case of iurodstvo). By juxtaposing temporally discrete case studies, this panel seeks to show how authority can neither be defined nor analysed singly in premodern texts, but reflects often discordant manifestations of power. Chair: Angus Russell (U of Cambridge, UK) Papers: Olga Grinchenko (U of Nottingham, UK), The Authority of Byzantine Liturgy in Early Slavonic Liturgical Manuscripts; Sofia Simões Coelho (U of Oxford, UK), Holy Foolery (Iurodstvo) and the Transformations of Sixteenth-century Rus'; Vera Gagarina (U of Cambridge, UK), The Authority of the Nomocanon in Early Rus' in the 11th-13th Centuries; Angus Russell (U of Cambridge, UK), Institutional Genealogies in Post-Mongol Moscow Discussant: Yulia Mikhailova (New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology)
Friday, November 11, 2022
Between Translation and Creation: Compositional Strategies in pre-Modern Slavonic Literature 4:15 to 6:00pm CST (Sat, November 12, 12:15 to 2:00am EET), The Palmer House Hilton, Floor: 7th Floor, LaSalle 3 By looking at two Slavonic epic works traditionally labelled as translations, the Digenis Akritis and the Alexander Romance, and at a pseudo-historical legend considered an original Rus’ian work, the Legend of the Calling of the Varangians, this panel intends to understand strategies of literary composition in the medieval Slavonic world. Chair: Jennifer B. Spock (Eastern Kentucky U) Papers: Robert Romanchuk (Florida State U), The Old Slavic Digenis Akritis and the Story-Patterns of Greek and Slavic Oral-Traditional Epic Song; Susana Torres Prieto (IE U, Spain), 'Without Hesitation, Repetition, or Deviation': Innovation in Kyivan Rus’ scriptoria; Ines Garcia de la Puente (Boston U), Translating the Origins: The Legend of the Foundation of Rus’ as Re-Writing Discussant: Simon Franklin (U of Cambridge, UK)
Saturday November 12,
Why and Why-Nots of Early Russian Development: Some Counter-Factual Peeking 12:30 to 2:15pm CST (8:30 to 10:15pm EET), The Palmer House Hilton, Floor: 3rd Floor, Salon 8 Counter-factual history is an intriguing method to investigate contingencies that plausibly could have happened. Like any history, counter-factual history involves close reading of primary and secondary sources in order to detect “shifts” or “outcomes” that even easily could have transpired and produced momentous changes in the received wisdom of historical records. Jeremy M. Black, in his introduction to Other Pasts, Different Presents, Alternative Futures (2015), proposed three criteria for determining whether a counter-factual is helpful: (1) it must have been considered by contemporaries, (2) it must be probable, and (3) it must “illuminate” the “uncertainty” of the time. Whether helpful or not, a counter-factual must also be in the subjunctive (“What if?”) mood. Newer research (archeology, population density studies, textology, land tenure systems) continue to refine our comprehension of counterfactual alternatives in Early Eastern Slavic history. Our three presentations not only are cognizant of advances in these disciplines, they propel them further with their synchronic and diachronic re-interpretive approaches and their skepticism towards historiographical tropes. Our first paper portrays how a variety of political models might have come into play (suppositionally different from those that did appear) in the lands of Rusʹ had the thirteenth-century Mongol invasions never taken place. The second paper analyses a concocted legend about a Roman-era aristocrat and his family who fled Italy for a new abode in the Eastern Baltic lands. This presentation will show how this tale became embedded in a fifteenth-century Lithuanian chronicle as a counter-claim to Russian chronicles’ enshrinement of the Rurikid Dynasty’s genealogical right to rule over the lands of Rusʹ. The third presentation portrays the process and the conceivable effects of a shift to peasant, wage-labor and attendant peasant freedom of movement in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russia. Our panel nests well within this year’s ASEEES theme of “Precarity” and its attendant description. The three papers explicitly and implicitly will raise issues of instability and uncertainty surrounding a host of biological, cultural, agnatic, and economic uncertainties, and in so doing sharpen our insights into the precariousness of existence during the Medieval and Early Modern Eastern Slavic and Eastern European time frame. An extensive range of methodological knowledge and techniques have long infused the scholarship of our three presenters and of our Chair and Discussant. Chair: Ines Garcia de la Puente (Boston U) Papers: Yulia Mikhailova (New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology), What if the Mongol Conquest Had Not Happened?; Donald Ostrowski (Harvard U), Fifteenth-Century Claims to Inherit Rus′: Counter-factuals and Alternative Facts; Peter B. Brown (Rhode Island College), Why Not Hired Labor Instead of Serfdom?: An Alternative Look at Muscovite and Early Imperial Russia Discussant: Jennifer B. Spock (Eastern Kentucky U)
The Early Slavic Studies Association recommends the following panels at the virtual ASEEES convention, October 13-14 to its members as well as to alle persons interested:
On the Margins of Enlightenment Russia
Thu, October 13, 10:15am to 12:00pm, ASEEES 2022 Virtual Convention, VR3
We are going to discuss the specifics of the deep internal contradictions inherent in the Russian 18th century. The most obvious and deepest contradictions were associated with the conflict between modernization and tradition, enlightenment and superstition. The precarity of Russian society is reflected in different documents: visual, textual, and performance sources. Our panel focuses on the reflection of precarity and marginality in various materials and contexts.
Chair Gregory Afinogenov, Georgetown U
Papers
Ernest Alexander Zitser, Duke U The Barber of Moscow, or What’s So Funny about State-Sponsored Religious Persecution of Old Believers?
William Forrest Holden, U of Michigan ‘Superstitious People’: Orthodoxy and Empire in Chulkov’s Dictionary of Russian Superstitions (1782)
Elena Marasinova, Institute of Russian History, RAS / NRU Higher School of Economics (Russia)Russian Eighteenth-Century Culture between Triumph and Vanity in Andrei Belobotskii’s Pentateugum
Erica Camisa Morale, U of Southern California Punishment after the Death Penalty: Attitude towards the Body of a Criminal in Russia in the 18th Century
Discussant Gary J. Marker, SUNY Stony Brooks
Early Modern Ukrainian Lands as a Space for Transregional and Transcultural Connections
Thu, October 13, 12:30 to 2:15pm, ASEEES 2022 Virtual Convention, VR14
The Early Modern Ukrainian territories remain highly invisible in the international scholarship as various political developments and visions as well as scholarly trends have continuously disfavored the study of this area. This tendency, apart from being problematic in itself, also comes as an obstacle against the backdrop of the increasing awareness of the importance of transregional and transcultural interrelations in the study of history. This panel seeks to address precisely this issue and demonstrate the ways in which the study of Ukrainian lands would contribute to our understanding of various historical developments which unfolded through social, cultural and political interrelations, networks and exchanges. Different papers analyze such topics as transfer of knowledge and practices, geographical mobilities, introduction and implementation of imperial law and rule, shifting power relations.
Chair Tetiana Grygorieva, National U of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” (Ukraine)
Papers
Stanislav Mohylnyi, Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (Germany) Serfdom and Freedom in the Ukrainian-Russian Contact Zone in the Eighteenth Century
Stepan Blinder, U of Cambridge (UK) Commune bibliotheca tam professorum, quam studiosorum? Interconnecting Library Visits in the Early Modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
Bogdan Pavlish, Northwestern U Uses and Abuses of Church History in the Theatine Mission to Polish Armenians in the 1660s
Kateryna Pasichnyk, Martin Luther U Halle-Wittenberg (Germany) Medical Practice and Imperial Law in the Ukrainian Lands of the Russian Empire in the 18th Century
Discussant Alexandr Osipian, Freie U Berlin (Germany)
Early Slavic Studies in Digital History
Fri, October 14, 8:00 to 9:45am, ASEEES 2022 Virtual Convention, VR3
The panel presents various digital tools for working with sources. The presenters showcase possibilities for facilitating work with pre-modern Slavic sources, e.g. OCR on handwritten texts, the creation of digital and printed editions using OCR, as well as databases that present finished OCR projects based on various texts. The main tool shown will be Transkribus, which is used for recognizing handwriting in various languages and scripts and also provides a wide range of possibilities for creating philological editions of manuscripts, both digitally and in print. The Digital Livonia project shows how acts, charters, and letters can be transcribed and presented for further study via an Internet database accessible to all interested scholars.
Chair Cornelia Soldat, U of Cologne (Germany)
Papers
Achim Rabus, U of Freiburg (Germany)Handwritten Text Recognition for (pre-)modern Slavic
Marek Tamm, Tallinn U (Estonia) Digital Livonia: For a Digitally Enhanced Study of Medieval Livonia (ca 1200–1550)
Walker Thompson, U of Heidelberg (Germany) Digitizing Epifanii Slavinetskii's Greek–Slavonic–Latin Lexicon: Tools and Methods
Discussant Kelly O'Neill, Harvard U
Precarious Privacy: Russian Epistolary Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century
Fri, October 14, 10:15am to 12:00pm, ASEEES 2022 Virtual Convention, VR3
Although Russians had written letters long before the eighteenth century, 1708 marked a dramatic change in epistolary culture: it witnessed the publication of the first printed letter-writing manual in Russia, Priklady kako pishutsia komplimenty raznye. As Lina Bernstein has demonstrated, these model letters based on German sources were supposed to provide new models of behavior and thus modernize and westernize Russian society. Letter-writing throughout the long eighteenth century became inseparable from dramatic social changes and new understandings of educated Russians’ “public role and subjective self” (Schönle, Zorin, and Evstratov). Contributing to the rapidly growing field of Russian epistolary studies, this panel will explore how the new letter-writing culture reflected the changing boundaries between the personal and the official, the family and the court, ego-documents and literary facts.
Chair Alexei G. Evstratov, U of Oxford (UK)
Papers
Sara Dickinson, U of Genoa (Italy) Early Eighteenth-Century Letters and the Origins of Women’s Writing in Russia
Kelsey Rubin-Detlev, U of Southern California Why Publish Correspondence in Eighteenth-Century Russia?
Victoria S. Frede, UC Berkeley The Boundaries between Public and Private: Pavel and Sof’ia Stroganov in the 1790s
Ekaterina Shubenkina, U of Southern California Such an Exercise… Shapes Both the Heart and the Mind': Children’s Letter-Writing in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia as Moral Education
Discussant Andrew Kahn, U of Oxford (UK)
Patronage Politics in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine
Fri, October 14, 12:30 to 2:15pm, ASEEES 2022 Virtual Convention, VR3
In this interdisciplinary and international panel, three Russia-based historians (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ekaterinburg) will discuss their ongoing research on patron-client relations in early modern Russia and Ukraine, as well as between Russia and Ukraine (16th-18th centuries). The panel will also include commentary by one of the leading US authorities on the topic. The purpose is to look at the development of early modern Russian and Ukrainian patronage politics in both a regional and a broader comparative perspective.
Chair Ernest Alexander Zitser, Duke U
Papers
Mikhail Markovich Krom, European U at St. Petersburg (Russia) Patron-Client Relations in Early Modern Muscovy: Origins, Types, and Specific Features
Maya Borisovna Lavrinovich, NRU Higher School of Economics (Russia) 'Imagined Brothers': Transformation of Patronage and Clientage in the Age of Sensibility
Kirill Kochegarov, Russian Academy of Sciences (Russia) The Patronage of Late 17th to Early 18th-Century Russian Grandees towards Ukrainian Elites: From Occasional Support to a System of Patron-Client Relations?
The Early Slavic Studies Association (ESSA) announces its prize for the best article in the field of Early Slavic Studies for 2022. Articles published between September 1, 2020 and August 31, 2022 will be eligible for the award. The prize committee is also willing to consider a special award for best translation of primary source material in the field, to be awarded at the committee’s discretion.
All nominated works must be in English. The committee will accept both nominations and self-nominations. Authors must be members of ESSA in good standing. Please contact our secretary, Ashley Morse here to confirm your eligibility. All nominations should be sent to the chair of the prize committee, Maria Grazia Bartolini (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) by Sunday, September 25, 2022.
