FROM THE DIRECTOR

Dear REEES colleagues and affiliates,

We start the AY25 Spring semester with three events in REEES’s ongoing support for Ukraine.  As we approach the third anniversary of the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion (24 February 2022), we invite colleagues and community members to consider how we can continue, whether through donations (see our REEES Fall 2023 newsletter for potential donation sites); or through volunteer work (such as at Krakow’s Freedom Space Foundation, where several Pitt alumni or PhD students have worked); or through attendance at related events such as the three listed here. 

The first (Wednesday, 29 January from 4:00 to 5:30 in Cathedral of Learning 501) is a book talk by Prof. Adriana Helbig (Music; Undergraduate Associate Dean).  Prof. Helbig’s book, ReSounding Poverty: Romani Music and Development Aid (Oxford University Press, 2023), presents a new matrix for understanding the role of Western development aid in reifying poverty and marginalization in post-Soviet Europe, including in the Ukrainian Roma communities. Prof. Helbig is the winner of the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology for the most distinguished English-language monograph, published as the author’s second or later monograph. The talk is free and open to the public.  All welcome!

On the anniversary itself (Monday, 24 February from 6:30 to 8:45 in Frick Fine Arts Auditorium) we invite you to attend Ukraine: Soldiers of Song (dir. Ryan Smith; 2024), a documentary screening and discussion featuring the country’s best-known musicians and singers.  In-person speakers include Matthew Hickey (President, Graduate Organization for the Study of Europe and Central Asia); Prof. Adriana Helbig (Music; Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies); and the film’s director and producer Ryan Smith.

Our third event on Friday, 28 March from 7:00 to 9:00 in Bellefield Hall Auditorium (315 South Bellefield Avenue) is the Women’s Bandura Ensemble of North America.  This twenty-person ensemble of singers and musicians celebrates a vital Ukrainian cultural tradition. It is rare that one has the chance to hear a live bandura concert; we encourage you to come for this extraordinary performance.  Our co-sponsors for the three events include the European Studies Center, GOSECA, the departments of Music and Slavic.
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Far from the battle for Ukraine’s independence and civil peace lies a different set of regional challenges germane to our REEES mission.  At the start of the new semester, REEES would like to take time to congratulate an affiliate and colleague who is retiring after an extraordinary twelve-year contribution in the region we study. 

Dr. Maggie McDonald, associate vice chancellor for academic and global affairs (Schools of Health Sciences), has put years of dedicated work into establishing a unique partnership between Pitt’s School of Medicine and the first (and only) graduate-level MD program in Central Asia at Nazarbayev University’s School of Medicine (NUSOM) in Astana. Dr. McDonald’s achievements during her total of forty-one years at Pitt are varied and legion, but we will focus here on the one most relevant to REEES commitments.

Together with a core team of three Pitt colleagues—Dr. Michael Elnicki (director of medical student assessment and professor in the Department of Medicine); Dr. Saleem Khan (associate dean for graduate studies and academic affairs and professor of microbiology and molecular genetics); and Dr. Ann E. Thompson (vice dean emerita for the School of Medicine and Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of Critical Care Medicine)—Maggie McDonald has led the way in working with Nazarbayev colleagues to enable the next generation of physician-scientists to become  Central Asia’s future leaders in medical education, clinical practice, and biomedical research. The goals of Maggie’s team have entailed such foundational tasks as curriculum development, policy protocols and implementation, designing teaching facilities, as well as the hiring and training of faculty and administrators so as to found this unique medical school from the ground up.

What makes this achievement both distinct and invaluable—compared to other US international medical schools such as those established abroad by Duke and Cornell—is the fact that the Nazarbayev partnership was built from scratch—education, clinical practice, hospital system, training—with the full participation of both parties in a region that is (in Dr. McDonald’s words) not so much “resource-poor, as know-how poor,” where medical education was still oriented toward “a highly didactic model, not entirely based on current, evidence-based knowledge and care.”

Nazarbayev University itself was founded only in 2010; Dr. McDonald’s work began a mere two years later (2012).  Since the 2015 arrival of the first incoming students, the Pitt team has helped to shepherd six graduating classes through a (now) fully accredited four-year medical program with a U.S.-based curriculum modeled on that of Pitt Med.  The accreditation process has involved a rigorous evaluation of the school’s curriculum, faculty qualifications, research opportunities, student support services and clinical facilities.  Such a process normally results in initial accreditation for one to three years.  The accreditation team, a regional agency of the World Federation for Medical Education, recognized the high quality of NUSOM’s efforts by awarding the program a rare five-year accreditation period, thanks in part to the efforts of more than fifty Pitt Med faculty members.  This April 2024 recognition positions NUSOM as the only graduate-level MD program in a region where students typically go into medical school directly from high school.

June 2024 graduation, Nazarbayev University School of Medicine (Astana, Kazakhstan)

We wish Dr. McDonald a smooth transition and we include here (with pride) a photograph of the June 2024 Nazarbayev graduation.  Maggie may be smallest colleague in the photogragh (front row, fifth from the right), but she leaves a big legacy, including her transformative influence on six graduating classes at Kazakhstan’s first medical school to offer a medical curriculum grounded in participatory learning and worked out in close coordination with Nazarbayev colleagues to assure regional relevance.

Cordially,

Nancy Condee, Director
Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies
University Center for International Studies

UPCOMING SERIES

Bodies in Focus: Power, Subjectivity, and Practice in

East European and Eurasian Studies

This series will explore power, subjectivity, and practice in East European and Eurasian Studies through virtually recorded panels, featuring scholars across a variety of disciplines as well as arts and social justice practitioners. Click on "Learn More" to watch the previous three sessions.

January 31. Emerging Scholars on Body Studies.                            11:00 am - 12:30 pm (EST) | 10:00 am - 11:30 am (CST) | 8:00 -9:30 am  REGISTER

February 7. Centering the Body in Pedagogy & Teaching.            11:00 am - 12:30 pm (EST) | 10:00 am - 11:30 am (CST) | 8:00 -9:30 am  REGISTER

February 21. Body Matters & Liberation in East European and Eurasian Studies                                                                                11:00 am - 12:30 pm (EST) | 10:00 am - 11:30 am (CST) | 8:00 -9:30 am  REGISTER                                                                                  

FEATURED EVENTS

ENGAGEMENT

RETROSPECTIVE

What to do, now that Russian archives are off limits?  Pitt PhD students visit NYC Film Archives

In October, REEES funded seven Pitt Slavic PhD students and Prof. Anna Kovalova (Slavic) on a field trip to work in NYC film archives. Their goal was to collect materials on the distribution and censorship of Soviet films in the United States. Samantha Bodamer, Mikhail Itkin, Maria Natalyuk, Dasha Prokhorova, Jacob Richey, Elizaveta Volkovskaia, Daniel Witkin, and Prof. Kovalova visited the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to work with censorship records, newspaper clippings, English scripts, and scrapbooks with promotional photographs that shed light on the reception of Soviet films in the US. At the New York Public Library, they watched the rare 16 mm print of the film The Road to Life (Putevka v zhizn’; 1931, dir. Nikolai Ekk).  Two additional Film/Slavic colleagues from Columbia University (Anastasia Kostina and Elizaveta Senatorova) joined the group.

Pitt graduate students at the New York State Archives in Albany. From left to right: Maria Natalyuk, Mikhail Itkin, Elizaveta Volkovskaia, and Jacob Richey. Photo credit: Anna Kovaleva.

Since it is currently impossible to access Russian archives, this field trip was largely targeted at providing relevant research and archival training for students. The trip resulted in finding new sources on reception of many significant Soviet films such as The Broken Shoes (Rvanyie bashmaki; 1933, dir. Margarita Barskaia), Wings of a Serf (Kryl’ia kholopa; 1926, dir. Iurii Tarich), and The Peasants (Krest’ianie; 1935, dir. Fridrikh Ermler). Pitt graduate students were allowed to order copies of documents from the New York State Archives (Albany). Initial review of materials suggested that American censors did not pay much attention to the Soviet political messages but were more concerned with scenes or intertitles with religious or sexual content. For example, the film Earth in Prison, distributed in the US as The Yellow Ticket (1927, dir. Fedor Otsep), was a Soviet film heavily censored in the US because the plot largely focused on prostitution. This may mean that US film censorship did not draw a firm line between domestic and Soviet film production; this hypothesis is yet to be confirmed. The group is now preparing a scholarly publication based on the newly acquired materials.

Pitt School of Medicine Hosts Visiting Doctor from Ukraine

Together with Maggie McDonald (Special Advisor, Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor for the Health Sciences), REEES is proud to spotlight its participation in hosting Ukrainian professor, researcher and primary-care physician Viktoriia Tkachenko (Shupyk National Healthcare University, Kyiv) at Pitt’s School of Medicine as part of the BridgeUSA Ukrainian Academic Fellows Program. The program aims to establish connections between Ukrainian and U.S. scholars to foster long-term collaboration in areas such as joint research and pedagogy, course development, and publication.  Tkachenko’s research during her time in Pittsburgh centered on mental health in primary care medicine, which has become increasingly urgent since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Tkachenko’s faculty mentor was Bruce Rollman (UPMC Professor of General Internal Medicine; director of the Center for Behavioral Health, Media and Technology, School of Medicine). Rollman took the lead in introducing Tkachenko to Ronald Poropatich (professor of medicine and director of the Center for Military Medicine Research, School of Medicine); and Gretchen Haas (associate professor of psychiatry, School of Medicine, and director of the Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center). “People from different sciences have helped me to understand a multidisciplinary approach on how to better improve the mental health situation in Ukraine,” said Tkachenko.

Together with Special Advisor McDonald, REEES also collaborated with the Swanson School of Engineering to host a second Ukrainian researcher, Vitalii Ishchenko, through the program. Ishchenko’s faculty mentor was Götz Veser (professor of chemical engineering, School of Engineering).

Interview by Shannon Turgeon, Senior Communications Specialist, School of Medicine.

FACULTY SPOTLIGHTS

Brian Fairley is the UCIS Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. He studies song, sound, and media across historical and ethnographic settings. In his work on traditional singing from the Republic of Georgia in the Caucasus, Brian brings together approaches from ethnomusicology, historical musicology, sound studies, and media archaeology. His manuscript in progress, Separating Sounds: A Media History of Georgian Polyphony, excavates a series of experimental recordings of Georgian music from 1916 to today, showing how prominent scholars and scientists repeatedly tried to capture this elusive musical tradition on record.

Max Trecker is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of Pittsburgh and an economic historian and postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for History and Culture of Eastern Europe in Leipzig, Germany. He’s the author of Red Money for the Global South: East-South Economic Relations in the Cold War (Routledge, 2020). His most recent book, Neue Unternehmer braucht das Land: Die Genese des ostdeutschen Mittelstands nach der Wiedervereinigung (Ch. Links Verlag, 2022).

STAFF SPOTLIGHTS

Meet REEES's new Assistant Director for Academic Affairs! Ryan Gartland holds an M.A. in Liberal Arts from the University of Chicago (2020) and an MSc in History from the University of Edinburgh (2024). Before joining CREEES, Ryan taught AP European History and AP World History for Chicago Public Schools (2014-2024) and served as an Exam Reader for the College Board. He is also an avid world traveler, with particularly extensive travel and study abroad experiences in Ukraine, Poland, and Russia, and hopes in the near future to finally make it to Armenia, Georgia, and Uzbekistan. His affiliations with Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia originated while growing up in Michigan during the early 1990s and hearing historical accounts from Lithuanian, Polish, and Bosnian diasporas, as well as paying attentive focus to the events surrounding the collapse of European communism, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the disintegration of Yugoslavia. He became fascinated as an undergraduate at Michigan State with the historical relationship between Poles and Ukrainians within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and pursuing this interest became the impetus for him to not only major in History as a subject but also specialize in Russian & East European studies as a topic. He is very excited to join the REEES team at Pitt as the next chapter of his professional career, and looks forward to contributing to a setting uniquely purposed towards advancing understandings of the peoples and places specific to the CREEES mission. He is always pleased to meet with students who seek to discuss academic enrollment with the center or to just chat about shared topics of interest. And, of course, he looks forward to when peace returns to Ukraine.

Meet Lia Sheahan, the Eurasian Knot's Student Contributer and worker for the World Historical Gazatteer! 

FACULTY AND STAFF NEWS

Olga Blackledge (Slavic Languages and Literatures) served as a reviewer for the article "Anastasiia Ralileieva: Patron the Dog (animated series, UA)," for the 86th edition of KinoKultura. She presented "The World Witnessed: Ukrainian Animation at Times of War," at the 2024 ASEEES Convention in Boston, and screened a collection of Ukrainian animated films alongide Anna Tropnikova (Yale University). She taught two courses, "Vampire: Blood and Empire" and "Behind Bars: Cross-Cultural Representations of the Prison in the 20th Century."

During the fall 2024 semester, Professor Ronald A. Brand (Center for International Legal Education) joined Professors Dorothee Landgraf and Patrick Sorek from Duquesne University and Professor Kirk Junker from the University of Cologne in offering a course titled “Comparative Law: The United States and the EU.” This was the second time the course has been offered by the three law schools, with the text run occurring in fall 2023. In fall 2023, Professor Brand arranged for students from Donetsk National University in Ukraine (now located in Vinnytsia, Ukraine) to participate. During the fall of 2024, Professor Brand arranged for students from Western Ukraine National University School of Law in Ternopil, Ukraine, to participate.

Professor Peter Brusilovsky (School of Computing and Information) continues his collaboration with Slovak KiNIT, an AI research institute. He has worked on several papers, including "Chat GPT to Replace Crowdsourcing of Paraphrases for Intent Classification: Higher Diversity and Comparable Model Robustness" (2023).

Nancy Condee (Slavic Languages and Literatures, REEES Director) gave three talks in Fall AY25. At Columbia University (Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies), she was a guest speaker at the book launch From Pushkin to Popular Culture: Essays by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy (19 September 2024).  At Yale University (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures), she gave a keynote (“Reading the Unreadable, or How Katerina Clark showed us the Beauty of All the Wrong Things”) at the event Soviet Cultures: The Ongoing Legacy of Katerina Clark (25-26 October 2024). At the University of Maryland (School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures), she was invited as discussant to make framing remarks at the symposium The Fifth Wave: Contemporary Russian Culture and Exile (Maya Brin Residency Program) on 8 November 2024. She also participated on the jury for the Inaugural Essay competition (November 2024) for the Flying University for Ukrainian Students (FUUS), where she serves on the Inaugural Advisory Board.

Brian Fairley (Music) has had a busy first semester at Pitt. In addition to teaching and helping his family get settled in their new city, Brian presented new work at four national conferences—for the American Musicological Society, Society for Ethnomusicology, German Studies Association, and ASEEES—and a virtual study day hosted by the Pitt Department of Music. He's looking forward to less travel this spring, as he works on turning his dissertation into a book manuscript. He'll also be teaching a section of the History department's Nationalism course focusing on music and nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe during the First World War. Finally, Brian is hatching plans to lead an informal Georgian singing group at Pitt—stay tuned for more information in the spring!

FAQ UKRAINE is the second poetry book by Oleksandr Fraze-Frazenko (Pittsburgh Network for Threatened Scholars) published in the United States. It contains new poems written in English (translated into Ukrainian) and selected works translated into English from Ukrainian. This book delves into the sophisticated and often controversial love-hate relationship between the poet and his motherland, guiding readers through the labyrinth of history while shedding light on the nation's uncertain future.

Adriana Helbig (Music; Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies, Arts & Sciences and General Studies) has won the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology for her book ReSounding Poverty: Romani Music and Development Aid (Oxford University Press, 2023). The Alan Merriam Prize recognizes the most distinguished English-language monograph in the field of ethnomusicology, published as the author’s second or later monograph.

Anna Kovalova (Slavic Languages and Literatures) has just publicly launched Daydreams: Early Cinema Database, the most comprehensive database of Russian imperial feature-film references, original librettos, and visual materials (advertising photographs, frames, posters) for more than 2500 films (1907-1919).  Prof. Kovalova presented the database at the 18th International Domitor Conference: A Long Early Cinema? (Vienna, 11-16, 2024).  Among Prof. Kovalova’s publications are three items: first, the article “Tears and Laughter: Filmmakers in Early Russian Cinema Press,” in Crafts, Trades, and Techniques of Early Cinema (ed. Ian Christie et al; open access., Michigan Publishing, 2024).  The second publication is Prof. Kovalova’s co-edited volume (with Peter Bagrov), entitled “Sinematograf vozvrashchaiet im liubov' k zhizni” Pervyi Vishnevskii sbornik [Cinema returned to them a love for life: The First Vishnevskii Collection] (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Dedinskogo, 2024), dedicated to Soviet cinema scholar and bibliographer V. E. Vishnevskii (1898-1952), containing her article “‘Russian Endings’: What were They Really Like?,” as well as a translation of work by UK film scholar Philip Cavendish (University College London). Prof. Kovalova’s third publication was a translation of chapters from Ana Hedberg Olenina's Psychomotor Aesthetics in the Russian-language journal NLO [New Literary Observer].

James Pickett (History) translated and published a Russian primary source abotu Central Asia: “The Watchmaker: Entangled Histories of Eurasia’s 19th Century Viewed through the Prism of a Traveler’s Odyssey,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 24, no. 3 (2023): 611-34.

Olga Seliazniova (Slavic Languages and Literatures) delivered a talk titled “A Non-Existent Phenomenon: Vagrancy in the Soviet Union” at Swarthmore College on November 14. The talk was based on her current book project, “Vagrancy in Russian Culture.”

STUDENT AND ALUMNI NEWS

Michael Sipper is the REEES Student Ambassador. He is pursuing degrees in Economics, Political Science and International Area Studies (with a REEES concentration), and Turkish. In recent news, Michael's Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) application to study advanced Turkish in Ankara, Türkiye, was admitted for the final selection panels. Additionally, he was one of the few undergraduate students at the University to be selected for the Midwest Political Science Association's (MPSA) Annual Conference in Chicago. His research unveiled notable inconsistencies in the implementation of gender quotas by the Uzbek government from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the contemporary date, highlighting the disparity between policy and implementation. Michael has also been selected as a semi-finalist for the Fulbright Scholarship to Azerbaijan.