Center for International Studies Hosts 55th Annual Meeting of the Central Slavic Conference
Held at the historic Missouri Athletic Club and on the campus of Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri, the Central Slavic Conference (CSC) held its annual meeting Oct. 21-23.
At the conference hosted by SLU's Center for International Studies, scholars, students and others interested in Slavic, East European and Eurasian studies shared research and exchanged ideas. After a nearly a decade of meeting with the International Studies Association - Midwest, the CSC once again held an independent, standalone meeting without relying on another scholarly society.
This year’s conference theme was the 60th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution. The conference program included panel discussions by survivors, reflections by Hungarian students and the Hungarian Diaspora, culminating in a keynote address by Tamas Nyirkos from Pazmany Peter Catholic University, whose talk was titled “Hungary, 1956: Revolution or Counterrevolution? The Continuing Relevance of the Debate.”
SLU involvement included:
- David Borgmeyer, Ph.D., director of the Center for International Studies, who presented “Dying In the Line of Fire: Painting Death in the Great War” and chaired a panel titled "From Brodsky to Pushkin to Brodsky,"
- Bruce O’Neill, Ph.D., assistant professor, who discussed “Stuck Here: Boredom and Diaspora in Post-socialist Bucharest,”
- Student Dora Hargitai, who participated in a roundtable titled "The Next Generation: Post-Socialist Hungarians on the Heritage of 1956,"
- David Murphy, who chaired a panel on Russian linguistics,
- Yelena Belyaeva-Standen, Ph.D., associate professor, who discussed “Culture and Gender Specific Uses of Compliments by Russians and Americans.”
Beginning five years ago, the Central Slavic Conference began annually presenting the Presidential Award “in recognition of outstanding and dedicated service to the Conference and the profession in promoting and sustaining Slavic Studies." This year’s winner was Russell Zguta, Ph.D., a history professor at the University of Missouri – Columbia, selected for a lifetime of support of the Central Slavic Conference and untiring promotion of Slavic studies.
The conference was cosponsored by SLU’s Russian and East European Area Studies and the Washington University International and Area Studies program.
The Central Slavic Conference (CSC) is a regional affiliate of the Association for Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), a scholarly society and the leading private organization in the world dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about the former Soviet Union (including Eurasia) and Eastern and Central Europe. The CSC is the oldest regional affiliate of ASEEES, founded in 1962. It promotes inter- and multi-disciplinary scholarship on Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian topics in a seven-state region including Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Colorado, though the organization's members come from across the United States and around the world. The organization's most important event is an annual meeting that, since 2007, has taken place in the fall in St. Louis, Missouri.