Nov 06 2007
TRF at AAASS
The 2007 national conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies will be held next Thursday through Sunday (Nov 15th-18th) at the Marriott Hotel in New Orleans, LA. If you’re one of the academics who regularly checks in here at TRF, AAASS is a well-known entity. If not, then I should let you know that AAASS is a non-profit scholarly society dedicated to studying the lands of the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia. Although historians make up its largest sub-group, AAASS is multi-disciplinary. Its members come from nearly every academic field including political science, language and literature, anthropology, sociology, economics, etc.
A glance at the conference program [.pdf version] reveals that the Big Easy meet will have more than one dozen panels and/or roundtable sessions devoted to military and diplomatic subjects. Highlights include panels on Soviet foreign policy; economics and defense under Putin; the militarization of Soviet youth; Soviet foreign relations in the 20s & 30s and the history of US-Russian relations. On Sunday, the conference wraps up with a roundtable session devoted to “Russia’s Great World War, 1914-1921.” A significant number of individual mil-dip papers will also be delivered as part of broader themed panels. In short, frontoviki in attendance should have plenty to do in between the weekend’s slate of NCAA and NFL games.
If you’ll be at the conference and haven’t already made plans for lunch on Friday, please consider joining me for an informal lunch with readers of and contributors to The Russian Front. We’ll meet in the lobby of the New Orleans Marriott next to the concierge desk at 12:30 pm sharp and decide where to go from there. (Like I said, it’s informal.)
Safe travels! And I hope to see you next week!
ScP