THE RUSSIAN FRONT

Late last week I drove over to Lawrence, Kansas to attend the day-and-a-half-long conference/birthday party marking the 50th Anniversary of KU’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES). Formally constituted in 1960 or, perhaps, 1961 (who’s counting?), KU CREES is among the longest running of the nation’s Russian/East European area centers that emerged in the wake of Sputnik’s launch. Since 1965, it’s been a National Resource Center offering language training,  degree-granting programs, and serving as a resource for K-12 teachers, post-secondary educators, business, media, government, and military.

The crux of the conference involved a series of presentations by KU CREES alumni and current faculty focusing on the Center’s past, present, and future. Guest speakers included one of the Center’s founding members, Richard De George (KU Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, of Russian and East European Studies, and of Business Administration), and several of its most prominent graduates, including John C. Reppert (Dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall Center for Security Studies), Thomas Wilhelm (Director of the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas), and Glen Howard (President of The Jamestown Foundation).

As one would expect for an event such as this, a good deal of time was devoted to extolling KU’s considerable accomplishments in promoting the study of all things Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian. Speakers also focused  remarks on the continuing relevance of an area-studies approach to fostering and sustaining knowledge of the world beyond America’s borders. The most striking aspect of the presentations, however, was a recurring meme that cut across each one of the conference’s dozen or so talks: the vital importance of studying foreign language. Every one of the event’s featured guests (and the vast majority of attendees) owe their current stations in life in no small part to the fact that during their educational career they seized upon the opportunity to not only study, but to master, one or more foreign languages.

Setting aside liberal arts agit-prop regarding the inherent, humanistic value of knowing another culture’s language, there are immense “practical” advantages to be gained from acquiring language skills: from raising one’s standardized test scores, to broadening employment opportunities, to significantly improving fluency in one’s native language. Students looking to get the most “return on investment” in their education would be hard-pressed to do better than investing time and energy mastering a foreign tongue.

It’s not easy. Depending on the target language it can be very difficult and time-consuming. Despite myriad “advances” in instructional technology the acquisition of a foreign language still boils down to a great deal of memorization and repetitive practice. But it is far from impossible. (I started my own language training in Russian relatively late — during my sophomore year at KU).

It’s the one piece of advice I have constantly given students during the course of my teaching career. If you learn nothing else in school — learn a foreign language!

Orlando Figes appears to have recovered from the illness that had him on sick leave from Birkbeck College of the University of London in the wake of his phantom reviews scandal. He’s lectured at the Universidad Gabriela Mistral in Chile. Announcement is here; agenda is here (both are entirely in Spanish). There’s even a photo gallery posted at Flickr.

UPDATE: the links to Gabriela Mistral were dead for a while, but they appear to be back up. There’s also a newspaper clipping at a Chilean Russophile site.

UPDATE 2: The Independent tells us that this winter trip to Chile was part of a family vacation taken with the approval of Birkbeck College.

With the AAASS annual conference having come and gone, I’d like to extend my thanks to the dozen or so folks who showed up for the Russian Front lunch. It was a great success. We’ll aim to reprise the event at next year’s meeting in Philadelphia.

The big news out of the New Orleans conference involved Sunday’s heavily attended roundtable devoted to “Russia’s Great War in Global Perspective, 1914-1922.”

In contrast to the typical conference roundtable which brings academics together to jawbone this or that subject, Sunday’s gathering served as the informal launch of a new long-term scholarly project. The session’s chairman, John W. Steinberg, announced that he, fellow roundtable members (Anthony Heywood, Steven Marks, David McDonald, Bruce Menning, and Grayson Tunstall) and others have been hard at work laying the foundation for a major new research initiative devoted to re-examining Russia’s experience in the First World War. Steinberg, et al. then used the occasion to describe the broad outlines of the initiative and to invite participation from scholars as well as current (and future) graduate students.

According to the project’s directors (Steinberg and Heywood), “Russia’s Great War in Global Perspective” aims to produce seven volumes of new essays each dedicated to a separate theme concerning the War in the “East.” These are:

1. Military Operations

2. Diplomacy and Foreign Affairs

3. European Russia

4. Empire (Western borderlands, Caucasus, Central Asia)

5. The Far East

6. Central and South-Eastern Europe

7. Culture

The compilation of these volumes will involved perhaps as many as 150-200 separate contributing members drawn from scholars across the globe. Publication will be timed to coincide with the centennial of the War, Revolutions, and Civil War (2014-2022). [An eighth “virtual” volume incorporating the latest in new media technologies is also in the works.]

In short, it’s an immensely ambitious and important project; one that promises to fundamentally alter the way historians and laypersons understand World War I and to shape research agendas for the next hundred years.

You’ll be hearing more (perhaps, a lot more) about “Russia’s Great War” here at TRF in the future. In the meantime, kudos to these historians for thinking big about the twentieth century’s most important conflict.

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

[Cross-posted from Dictatorship of the Air]

Like most institutions associated with academia, the academic conference is a curious thing. It’s a combination of educational seminar, professional retreat, class reunion, and subsidized junket. It’s also an integral (and unavoidable) part of being professional scholar.

I attended my first conference as an undergraduate in the spring of 1988. It was a meeting held by a regional affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS). Since the early 1990s I’ve averaged at least one a year. Typically I present at the AAASS national gathering, but I’ve been to others, too: AATSEEL, SAH, AHA — as well as the occasional thematic conference dedicated to aviation or some aspect of Russian culture or history.

Regardless of the specific association or venue, scholarly conferences typically share a common structure and rituals: dozens of individual panels spread out over three or four days interspersed with official side trips to sites of (professional) interest; informal evening gatherings; the requisite banquet/keynote/awards ceremony and, of course, a book display. They also come with a common cast of characters: earnest young graduate students learning the ropes; arrogant Young Turks trying to “change the dominant paradigm,” jaded senior scholars looking forward to retirement; and workaday faculty enjoying their lone opportunity to escape from their teaching (only!) institutions — plus a slew of recent (and soon-to-be) Ph.D.s willing to sell their souls for their first tenure-track jobs.

After you’ve been around for a while and attended a handful or so, it becomes pretty obvious that if you’ve been to one academic conference, you’ve been to them all. You always know what to expect, until you encounter the unexpected.

I did just that this past weekend.
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