Robert Bird
Robert Bird
Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, and the College
This project took the centenary of the Russian Revolution as an opportunity to interrogate the links between political and intellectual change, with a focus on the role of media in the dissemination of revolutionary ideas. |
Beginning on the centenary of the Russian revolutions, this project questioned the concept of revolution, specifically the link between political and intellectual change. The Russian revolutions in 1917 quickly reverberated around the world, generating revolutions and political changes from East Asia to Latin America and Africa, but also framing a broad paradigm shift in intellectual life. Communist aesthetics, the artistic avant-garde, Russian formalism, the Bakhtin Circle: all were parts of a global intellectual revolution whose causes, ramifications, and impact stretched far beyond the Soviet Union, beyond even the reach of global communism. This history forces us to ask: What constitutes an intellectual revolution? What are its causes and mechanisms? How do revolutionary cultural and intellectual changes relate to political change? What role is played by the disruption of settled populations and by the waves of migration revolution sets off? To what degree can intellectual revolution be translated and re-situated? How do new media change our understanding of these mechanisms and the prospects for future intellectual revolutions? Are we today in a revolutionary moment? The project addressed these questions in collaboration with Visiting Fellows and participants in a series of three workshops that focused on pivotal revolutionary moments (1917, 1968) and key texts in the production and dissemination of intellectual revolution. The project also supported the creation of a publicly accessible digital archive with sophisticated tools of data visualization and produced a special issue of the journal Studies in East European Thought on the theme of "The Bolshevik Contagion."
Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, and the College
Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of Russian History and the College
Associate Professor and Department Chair of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures
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