| 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
University of Chicago
Robert Bird (1969 – 2020) studied the aesthetic practice and theory of Russian modernism. His first full-length book, Russian Prospero (2006), is a comprehensive study of the poetry and thought of Viacheslav Ivanov. He was also the author of two books on the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky,...
Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of Russian History and the College
University of Chicago
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Professor at the University of Sydney and Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of the University of Chicago, is one of the world's leading scholars of Soviet history. Her recent books include Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia...
Associate Professor and Department Chair of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures
University of Colorado Boulder
Davide Stimilli is Associate Professor of German, Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of Fisionomia di Kafka (2001) and The Face of Immortality: Physiognomy and Criticism (2005) and the editor of Aby Warburg’s...
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This conference, sponsored by the Revolutionology project at the Neubauer Collegium, asked how the revolutions of the...
Presenters at this two-day workshop, the first in a series sponsored by the Neubauer Collegium research project
Interpretation of the Russian Revolution has always been politically contentious, in the West as in the Soviet Union and its successor states. But the centenary, coming only a few decades after...
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
This conference, sponsored by the Revolutionology project at the Neubauer Collegium, asked how the revolutions of the...
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
Presenters at this two-day workshop, the first in a series sponsored by the Neubauer Collegium research project
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
Interpretation of the Russian Revolution has always been politically contentious, in the West as in the Soviet Union and its successor states. But the centenary, coming only a few decades after...
