Agenda

During the Cold War, the most relevant battlefield of the confrontation between Western and Eastern blocs was that of culture: a struggle which was fought employing books as ideological weapons. To map the topography of Cold War culture – a socio-cultural space characterized by intense transnational interactions between different actors (state and non-state individuals and institutions) – this talk will focus on the production and circulation of a specific and very peculiar cultural object, the tamizdat. The Russian acronym tamizdat (literally “published over there”) is used for referring to Soviet, Central and Eastern European texts which – censored or unpublished in the Eastern bloc – clandestinely managed to cross the Iron curtain and be published in the West.
By tracing the multinational and multidirectional routes of tamizdat magazines and books, and mapping the transnational relational networks of several actors responsible for their publication and circulation, this talk wants to illustrate how digital tools and visualizations can offer new perspectives to the analysis of socio-cultural and political phenomena, shedding new light on the interpretation of their complexity.

About the Speaker

Ilaria Sicari is a Marie Curie postdoctoral research fellow of the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice, and a visiting scholar at Stanford University, where she is affiliated with the Center for Russian Eastern European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). Her actual research – “Transnational Book Diplomacy beyond the Cultural Cold War: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the Tamizdat” (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101109157) – is a digital project devoted to the transnational production and circulation of tamizdat, with the aim to outline a comparative and intellectual history of the cultural Cold War.

Link for registration: https://docs.google.com/forms/u/0/d/e/1FAIpQLSevTyDc5qZMG92A4xCy1SMasVmuk8QaI0IvJfP4O2cs2RjCPg/viewform?usp=send_form&pli=1