Notorious Neo-Nationalism: A Cultural-Studies Reading of Post-Imperial Anxiety, Cyber-Warfare, and Russia’s Return to Authoritarianism
Please join us for another edition of our Tepper Lecture Series, sponsored by Tepper fund, with Professor Edith Clowes on February 20, 2020 at 5 pm in Tucker Hall Room 127A.
Our guest, Edith Clowes, Professor of Russian and Czech literature from University of Virginia, will give a talk titled: “Notorious Neo-Nationalism: A Cultural-Studies Reading of Post-Imperial Anxiety, Cyber-Warfare, and Russia’s Return to Authoritarianism.”
In the 1990s polls showed that the majority of Russians hoped to live in a post-Soviet country with genuine rule of law. What happened to make Russian public opinion turn—or seem to turn—in the course of a few short years toward what might be called a “make Russia great again” attitude? And why did the Russian leadership decide to start exporting ultraconservative views and values? To answer these questions Professor Clowes’s talk will focus on prominent ultra-nationalist writers— particularly Aleksandr Prokhanov and Aleksandr Dugin, whose blueprints have left a visible mark on contemporary Russian geo-politics.
Edith Clowes holds the Brown-Forman Chair in the Humanities and teaches Russian language, literature, and culture and Czech literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia. Her primary research and teaching interests span the interactions between literature, philosophy, religion, and utopian thought. Among her recent book-length publications are an interdisciplinary examination of post-Soviet Russian identity, Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geography and Post-Soviet Identity (Cornell, 2011); a discursive history of Russian philosophy, Fiction’s Overcoat: Russian Literary Culture and the Question of Philosophy (Cornell, 2004); and an editorial collaboration, Sbornik “Vekhi” v kontekste russkoi kul’tury (Moscow: Nauka, 2007).
