Third Tallinn Summer School in Soviet History & Culture
The summer school will be held at Tallinn University in Estonia from 28 July–4 August 2023. It is designed for Ph.D. students in the Humanities and Social Sciences; however, motivated MA students are also welcome to apply. The working language of the summer school is English.
At the 2023 Tallinn Summer School, we aim to bring together leading scholars and Ph.D. students of Soviet society and culture to discuss and scrutinize the fundamentals of the field. This time of rapid developments in the region and singular events of potential world-historical significance calls for a broader look at the historical trajectories of the realm that was once imperial Russia. It is time to revisit the big questions in Soviet studies and review the future of the field. We will do so by expanding the focus beyond the confines of the short 20th century and outside the boundaries of today’s Russian Federation. The war with Ukraine has brought Russia’s relationship with its former imperial realm (as well as its own internal minorities) into sharp focus, prompting the scholarly community to examine our prior biases and prejudices. Scholars of Ukraine, the Baltics, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, among many others, have called to reappraise prior historiography’s Russo-centrism and the often-neglected implications of Soviet nationality policies. We will take a critical and nuanced look at Soviet multinationality (including its “Russia”-question) while also examining other continuities in politics and culture across the 1917, 1940, and 1989 revolutionary divides.
Information on how to apply can be found here: https://sites.google.com/view/disentangling2023/home.
Organizing Committee:
- Epp Annus
- Karsten Brüggemann
- Linda Kaljundi
- Andres Kurg
- Uku Lember
- Kristo Nurmis
- Course Director: Kristo Nurmis
The summer school will feature keynote lectures by Joshua Sanborn (Lafayette College), Serhy Yekelchyk (University of Victoria), and Juliane Fürst (Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History).
Other faculty include Sofia Dyak (Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv), Botakoz Kassymbekova (University of Basel), Zbigniew Wojnowski (Oxford University), Aro Velmet (University of Southern California), Eglė Rindzevičiūtė (Kingston University), Madina Tlostanova (Linköping University) and several other local and international scholars working on Soviet interethnic relations, heritage and memory studies, environmental history, urban studies, cultural studies, history of science and technology, gender studies, and other related fields. The faculty will run workshops and engage in roundtable discussions, which will include ample time for questions and exchange with students.