The Wisconsin Slavic Conference, an annual event planned and implemented by PhD students in Slavic, took place on Friday, April 12 and Saturday, April 13. The keynote speaker was Rossen Djagalov (New York University), who presented on “Multinational Soviet Literature: A World-Literature History.” Our returning program alum for this year’s event was Thomas Tabatowski, who works as a teacher of Russian at the Noble Academy in Chicago and who gave a conference talk “‘No kak zhe obrazovat’ narod?’: On Teachers and Teaching.” This year’s UW-Madison faculty speaker was Oksana Stoychuk, who spoke on “Bridging Movements: Feminism and the National Cause in Independent Ukraine.”
Presentations at the conference spanned a wide range of themes—East Central European feminism, music, sculpture, homoerotic desire in literature, folk songs and charms, the historical novel, pedagogy, metaphor, lost manuscripts rediscovered, revolution and utopia, socialism, memory and selfhood, and settler colonialism. A full conference program is available here.
The J. Thomas Shaw Prize for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper was awarded to Piotr Kawulok for his talk “Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Conservative Utopia in The Połaniecki Family,” and an honorable mention was given to Yekaterina Pak for her presentation “Yurii Dombrowskii’s The Keeper of Antiquities: The Story of the Lost Manuscript or Some Manuscripts Don’t Burn.”
Slavic Studies thanks the 2024 organizing committee of Isabella Palange, Yekaterina Pak, and Marsel Khamitov. We are also grateful to support for the event from the Associated Students of Madison (ASM), a Wisconsin Experience Grant (WEG), the University Lectures Fund, GNS+, and CREECA. Much thanks also to this year’s faculty advisor, Andrew Reynolds.