The Crimean Peninsula is a geographical and cultural border region between Russia, Europe, and the Middle East. Crimea, which was occupied by Russia following the Ukrainian Euromaidan revolution, has been in the geopolitical spotlight since 2014. However, the peninsula has also long been a locus of Jewish imagination, and a homeland for other marginal national groups. Crimea has long been home to Jewish communities, and in the 1920s, Soviet Jewish farming colonies drew Jewish families who dreamed of building a Soviet Jewish homeland on the peninsula. This conference brings together scholars of literature and culture from around the world to explore the cultural significance of the region. Registration is required.

Polina Barskova teaches Russian Literatures. Her scholarly publications include articles on Nabokov, Bakhtin brothers, early Soviet film, and aestheticization of the historical trauma and a book project entitled “Petersburg Beseiged: Culture of the Aesthetic Opposition.” She has also authored many books of poetry in Russian.

Vitaly Chernetsky is an Associate Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (2007) and of numerous articles on Russian and Ukrainian literature and film where he seeks to highlight cross-disciplinary and cross-regional concerns. He co-edited two poetry in translation anthologies and guest-edited a special issue on Ukraine of the journal KinoKultura.

Valery Dymshits is a lecture at the European University (Saint Petersburg) and Saint Petersburg State University. Since the 1980s, he has been involved in studies of Jewish ethnography, folklore, Jewish literature, professional and folk Jewish art, as well as translation of poetry and prose from English, German and Yiddish. In 1989-2019 he took part in 30 expeditions, carrying out studies of Jewish ethnography, traditional art and oral history. His publication list includes about 25 books.

Gennady Estraikh is a professor at the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University, where he, in particular, directs the Shvidler Project for the History of the Jews in the Soviet Union. In 1988-91, he worked as Managing Editor of the Moscow Yiddish journal Sovetish Heymland. His new book, Transatlantic Russian Jewishness: Ideological Voyages of the Yiddish Daily Forverts in the First Half of the Twentieth Century is scheduled to come out in September 2020.

Jordan Finkin is Rare Book and Manuscript Librarian at the Klau Library of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. A specialist in modern Jewish literatures he is the author of several books as well as numerous scholarly essays and articles. His most recent book, Exile as Home, explores the work of the Yiddish poet Leyb Naydus. He is also the Director of Naydus Press, a non-profit publisher of Yiddish literature in translation.

Amelia Glaser is associate professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at UC San Diego. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands (Northwestern U.P., 2015), the editor of Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising, the coeditor (with Steven Lee) of Comintern Aesthetics, coedited with Steven Lee (Toronto U.P., 2020), and the translator of Proletpen: America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets (U. Wisconsin Press, 2005). Her second monograph is forthcoming in 2020: Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (Harvard U.P.).

Faith Jones is a librarian and translator in Vancouver, Canada. Her co-translation of Celia Dropkin's poetry, The Acrobat, has been widely adopted in classrooms and is a poetry bestseller. She is a member of the editorial collective at the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project, and a regular contributor to the Yiddish Book Center's Pakn Treger and other magazines. She is currently working on a collection of Shira Gorshman's short fiction.

Yuliya V. Ladygina is an Assistant Professor of Russian and Global Studies at Penn State. Her book, Bridging East and West: Ol’ha Kobylians’ka, Ukraine’s Pioneering Modernist (University of Toronto Press, 2019), stands out among many published articles, reviews, and translations of Ukrainian literature into English. Currently, Ladygina is working on a book project, War on Reels: Cinematic Representations of the Ukraine Crisis, which examines the legacy of Soviet and Hollywood war films, as well as the influence of contemporary media practices in (mis)representing war, terror, and terrorism, in cinematic representations of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian conflict.

Ludmila Shleyfer Lavine, Associate Professor at Bucknell University, has published on Pushkin, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Blok, and Mayakovsky. Her recent articles include “Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Agit-Semitism” (Russian Review 2019) and “Pushkin Pushing Production: The Repurposing of Literary Tradition by Vladimir Maiakovskii & Co.” (SEEJ 2018). She is currently working on Mayakovksy’s “verse of commerce” as well as on the echoes of Pushkin’s Ruslan and Liudmila in Nabokov’s Lolita.

Yelena Severina teaches courses on Russian literature and theater at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018. Her research focuses on Russian court culture of the eighteenth-century, modernism, silent film, performance studies, Ukrainian and Polish theaters.