Annual Workshop on Russian and Eurasian Modernisms: Scale

Scale became an important hermeneutic as scientific discoveries and technological advances in the modern era drew attention as never before to the quantities too large or too small for the unequipped human perception. Humans suddenly came to face the fact that the environment around them was swarming with invisible particles while new technologies were registering the behavior of microorganisms and the movements of electrons. Geological findings threw into vivid relief the unfathomably remote past and introduced the possibility of an earth before humans.  Advances in modern travel allowed humans to apprehend the scale of the world’s mass viscerally, both expanding and constricting its distances. The increased ease of travel led to the growth of the field of archaeology, enabling humans to perceive the magnitude of the past behind them. Spectroscopy and advances in photography made it feasible to examine the makeup of the stars and understand the origin of the universe. The natural sciences thus played a critical role in shaping a sense of being or becoming modern.

The Workshop aims to explore how modernist culture registered the shock of the newly acquired extension and magnification of human sense perception along the infinitely small and infinitely large vectors and how it responded to these radical reconfigurations of scale. 

Speakers:

Dima Arzyutov (Ohio State University)

Gabrielle Cornish (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Giulia Dossi (St. Olaf)

Hannah Gadbois (UIC)

Colleen McQuillen (University of Southern California)

Matthew Kendall (UIC)

Katarzyna Machrowicz-Wolny (UIC)

Michal Markowski (UIC)

Ekaterina Petrenko (UIC)

Cate Reilly (Duke University)

Philip Tuxbury-Gleissner (Ohio State University)

Julia Vaingurt (UIC)

Friday, April 18th, 10:00 am-6:00 pm - 

Institute for the Humanities, BSB Ste. 153
1007 W. Harrison St., Chicago IL, 60607

Saturday, April 19th, 10:00 am-2:00 pm - 

University Hall, Room 1501, 601 S Morgan St., Chicago IL, 60607

Co-Sponsored by: the SEE NEXT Working Group and Marina Mogilner, the Institute for the Humanities, the School of Literatures, Cultural Studies, and Linguistics, the Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies, and Moving Image Arts.