Guest lecture by Professor Roman Utkin
RPSS and German Studies invite you and your students to join us for a lecture by Professor Roman Utkin on “Queer Exile: Russian Emigres in Interwar Berlin and Paris” as part of the Tepper Lecture Series on Thursday, Oct. 15 at 5pm.
What is it like to be an exile within exile? To find one’s queer self doubly alienated among fellow refugees? This talk explores configurations of queer subjectivity in interwar Europe’s Russian diaspora. The story of the sizeable community of Russians who found themselves in exile in Berlin and Paris after the Bolshevik Revolution is richly documented in art and scholarship. Yet queer lives and experiences are largely absent from this story, save for the homophobic currents in the oeuvre of Vladimir Nabokov. However, his unapologetically gay and virtually unknown brother Sergey helps us discover how queer artists and intellectuals contented with the heteronormative world. The case of the Nabokov brothers reorients assumptions about kinship and shows how gender, sexuality, and ethnicity are interconnected in diasporic belonging.
Zoom Link is here.
Roman Utkin is Assistant Professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Wesleyan University. His current book project, Russian Berlin, examines the patterns of migration and cultural flows between Eastern and Central Europe and shows how refugees from Soviet Russia formed a unique diasporic community in Weimar Berlin.
Co-sponsored by the Gregory Tepper Lecture Fund, German Studies, and the Reves Center for International Studies