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Sep 19 2022

Radical Empathy: How Esperanto Reimagined the Russian Empire and Defies Historical Imagination

September 19, 2022

6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Location

Behavioral Sciences Building

Address

1007 W Harrison Street, Suite 153, Chicago, IL 60607

Calendar

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Radical Empathy

Seminar: East European and Northern Eurasian Crosstalk

September 19, 6 -8 PM

Speaker: Brigid O’Keeffe

Talk: Radical Empathy: How Esperanto Reimagined the Russian Empire and Defies Historical Imagination

Brigid O’Keeffe is a Professor of History at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She is the author of The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise; Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia; and New Soviet Gypsies: Nationality, Performance, and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union. O’Keeffe is currently at work on her next book, The Family Litvinov: A History of the Twentieth Century. Her book, Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), is the recipient of Ab Imperio 2021 award for the best study in new imperial history and history of diversity in Northern Eurasia.

Abstract

In 1887, a Jewish eye doctor named L. L. Zamenhof attempted to kickstart a global revolution. From the western borderlands of the Russian empire, Zamenhof offered the world Esperanto – an international auxiliary language that he hoped would transform imperial Russia and humanity as a whole. This talk will trace the history of Esperanto as a utopian vision rooted in the political culture of late imperial Russia through to its rise as a vibrant global movement that inspired women and men around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Esperanto opens the door to new ways of thinking about imperial Russian and Soviet history. It also challenges us to think about, and listen to, the voices of ordinary people whose alternative visions of modernity have too often been consigned to history’s margins and dustbins.

Contact

Institute for the Humanities
huminst@uic.edu

Date posted

Aug 23, 2022

Date updated

Sep 14, 2022