Annual summer seminar

There has been a growing understanding in the Russian American Studies Association that to survive and grow in the changing social and cultural environment it needs to explore new, future oriented paths.

One such possibility is an annual summer seminar in American Culture for advanced graduate students, young scholars/ teachers and professionals involved in American Studies and related programs around Russia.

As panelists (lecturers, discussion leaders) distinguished scholars from the U.S., Western Europe and Russia itself are being invited - providing for the high intellectual level, challenge and prestige of the event. Each year the seminar would focus on a particular set of culture related problems - equally (but differently) of interest to political scientists, linguists, historians, literature scholars, film critics, social workers etc. An interdisciplinary dicussion - broad but subtly targeted, sophisticated but nonspecialized, intensive but informal - would offer the participants a unique educational opportunity: a graduate seminar is an obvious forte of the American university education, still underdeveloped in the corresponding Russian framework. The climate of relaxed and mutually supportive bilingualism might contribute to the efficiency of the exchange - a way to get “around” the language barrier, but also (even more importantly!) to locate, explore and discuss its cultural “foundations”.

The objectives of the seminar (essentially following the model of Salzberg seminar but tailored to the needs and priorities of the Russian academic community) are the following:

• to give new impetus to the development of American Studies in Russia, raise its intellectual prestige, dynamism and attractiveness to the new generation of students,
• to develop stimulating and satisfying working relations between Russian Americanists and their colleagues in the Eastern and Western Europe and the United States,
• to help raise the efficiency of Russian-American academic exchange programs (the seminar offering both an opportunity of initial “screening” of prospective candidates and a “public-friendly” interdisciplinary forum inviting contributions from established Russian scholars - including those “non-Americanists” whose professional careers have been shaped or influenced by their American experiences).

Summer schools in American studies held at Moscow University 1997-2000:

• 1997: "American Culture as Text, Text as Culture".
• 1998: "America as Vision and Spectacle".

• 2000: "The Imagined Past of America: History as a Cultural Construct".

Summer School Coordinator - Tatiana Venediktova, Professor in American and Comparative Literature, Dept. Of Philology, Moscow University