CfP: 2027 Dmytro Shtohryn International Ukrainian Studies Conference

The Slavic Reference Service and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures are pleased to invite proposals for the biennial Dmytro Shtohryn International Ukrainian Studies Conference at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

 

Dates: September 30 – October 2, 2027

Theme: Lessons from Ukraine Across Disciplines

Format: Hybrid

 

The conference seeks to bring together scholars across disciplines and academic backgrounds to explore the theme of "Lessons from Ukraine." We encourage participants to approach this theme through a multidisciplinary lens, drawing on new methodologies, conceptual frameworks, and innovative practices to analyze, chronicle, or reconstruct how Ukraine's experience and resilience in the past and present contribute to global science and scholarship and our modern understanding of the world.

 

Proposals are invited from scholars across disciplines, including Law, Education, Economics, Technology, History, Social and Political Science, Humanities, Arts, and more. Graduate students, emerging scholars, and scholars based in the region are especially encouraged to participate.

 

Presentations will be held in a hybrid format, but we strongly encourage in-person participation. Working languages of the conference are English and Ukrainian. In addition to panels and a keynote address, the conference will include workshops, cultural events, and an exhibition of Lyudmyla Semykina’s artworks.

 

Proposal Submission Guidelines

 

If interested, please complete the Google Form and provide a 200-word abstract by Monday, December 14, 2026.

For more information, please visit the conference website https://uconference.web.illinois.edu/ or contact us at dmytroshtohrynconference@gmail.com with any questions.

Call for Applications for SHERA Grants and Prize

We are reaching out to you to solicit applications for three of SHERA’s annual prizes and grants. The deadline for submissions for all three is October 21, 2026. Recipients of all three will be announced at the SHERA Business Meeting at the ASEEES conference in November. Nominations should be emailed to shera.artarchitecture@gmail.com  Descriptions of the three grants/prizes are below. All SHERA Grants and Prizes for 2026 are generously supported by The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

 

Publication Grant

The SHERA Publication Grant supports the realization of publications of the highest scholarly and intellectual quality in the field of Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian art and architecture. The grant of up to $1,500 (up this year from $1,000 in years past) is intended to offset the substantial production expenses associated with the publication of an art-historical monograph, edited volume, or exhibition catalogue. Multiple publications may receive full or partial requested amounts if those amounts are below the grant maximum.

Book projects must have been accepted by a publisher in order to be considered. Funds may be directed toward production costs (such as image rights, image reproductions, subventions, or indexing) and/or towards releasing the book as an Open Access publication. The grant does not fund research, writing, or editorial labor. Projects that are financially self-supporting are not eligible. Applicants do not need to be SHERA members to apply, but the recipient must join in order to accept the grant.

Applications should include: author's email address for correspondence; confirmation of current SHERA membership status (Yes/ No); project description; author’s CV; a letter of intent to publish and readers’ reports from the publisher; and a budget detailing the expenses to which the grant will be applied, as well as other sources of funding available for the project.

Please send the above documents as a single PDF attachment to shera.artarchitecture@gmail.com with the subject title "SHERA 2026 Publication Grant."

Graduate Student / Early Career Travel Grant (CAA 2027)

The SHERA Graduate Student and Early Career Scholar Travel Grant will provide up to $1,000 toward travel and registration expenses for the CAA 2027 Annual Convention. Eligible candidates are graduate students and early career scholars and curators presenting a paper at the conference. “Early career” is defined as those who have been awarded the Ph.D. within the previous five years. Applications will be evaluated based on the merit of the paper, with preference given to applicants attending the conference for the first time and applicants without other sources of institutional support. Applicants need not be SHERA members at the time of application, but recipients are required to join SHERA in order to accept the grant. Expenses incurred before receipt of the grant can be covered by the grant, provided they are directly related to the conference travel and registration. Within two months after the conference, the recipient is required to submit to the SHERA Board a brief report outlining how participation in the conference furthered the development of their research. If the recipient has to withdraw from the conference for any reason, all funds must be returned to SHERA no later than the opening day of the conference.

Applications should include: email address for correspondence; confirmation of current SHERA membership status (Yes/ No); title and brief description of the paper accepted for the conference (250 words); the names of the chair(s) and the title of the panel in which the applicant is participating; a brief statement demonstrating need; and a brief CV (no more than two pages).

Please send the above documents as a single PDF attachment to shera.artarchitecture@gmail.com with the subject title "SHERA 2026 CAA Travel Grant."

 

Emerging Scholar Prize

The SHERA Emerging Scholar Prize aims to recognize and encourage original and innovative scholarship in the field of East European, Eurasian, and Russian art and architectural history. Applicants must have published an English-language article in a scholarly print or online journal, or museum print or online publication within the twelve-month period preceding the application deadline. Additionally, applicants are required to have received their PhD within the last 5 years and be a member of SHERA in good standing at the time that the application is submitted. The winner will be awarded $500 and republication (where copyright allows) or citation of the article on H-SHERA.

To apply, please send: a brief cover letter summarizing the context and significance of the essay; the essay; and a brief CV (no more than two pages).

Please send the above documents as a single PDF attachment to shera.artarchitecture@gmail.com with the subject title "SHERA 2026 Emerging Scholar Prize."

ZfL INFO 87/2026: Eastern Europe in Comics: Perspectives from Within and Beyond

Workshop

22 Oct 2026 – 23 Oct 2026

Eastern Europe in Comics: Perspectives from Within and Beyond

Venue: University of Innsbruck, Geiwi-Turm, 4. Stock, Innrain 52d, 6020 Innsbruck

Organized by Svitlana Pidoprygora (University of Innsbruck), Matthias Schwartz (ZfL)

Contact: Matthias Schwartz

Research project: Adjustment and Radicalisation

How has Eastern Europe been represented in comics across different historical periods and cultural contexts? Who tells these stories, from which perspective, and for which audiences? How do comics engage with imperial legacies, socialism and post-socialism, war, displacement, memory, and shifting borders?

Comics constitute a significant cultural form that reflects the social, cultural, and political dynamics of different societies. Owing to their hybrid visual-verbal form, they are able to address both historical processes and urgent contemporary realities, including war, violence, displacement, environmental disasters, and global crises. Over time, comics have developed into a versatile medium of documentary storytelling, graphic journalism, testimony, cultural memory, and political commentary.

This workshop aims to present a broad picture of representations of Eastern Europe in graphic narratives. It examines how the region has been visually and narratively constructed from both internal and external perspectives, from earlier European comics to contemporary local and global works. Ukraine serves as one of the central case studies. Special attention is paid to questions of voice, visibility, agency, trauma, cultural memory, and symbolic resistance.

The workshop brings together scholars from sociology, history, art history, literary studies, linguistics, media studies, comics studies, English philology, Ukrainian philology, and Slavic studies. By taking comics as a shared object of research, it creates space for interdisciplinary dialogue on narrative form, visual aesthetics, political representation, social identity, and transnational understandings of Eastern Europe.

The workshop is a collaboration between the University of Innsbruck, the collaborative project Adjustment and Radicalisation. Dynamics in Popular Culture(s) in Pre-War Eastern Europe, and Razom for Ukraine. It is supported by the European Union and the State of Tyrol.

Admission is free.

Please register for:

• In-person participation
• Online participation

Program

Thursday, 22 Oct 2026

9.20

• Jürgen Fuchsbauer, Eva Binder, Svitlana Pidoprygora (University of Innsbruck): Welcome Remarks / Introduction

9.40
Venue: Room 40406, GeiWi-Turm, Innrain 52

Panel 1: Viewing Ukraine: Ongoing War and Nuclear Memory
Chair: Yana Lyapova (University of Innsbruck)

• Gudrun Heidemann (University of Lodz): Ukraine in Focus: Sharp and Blurred Images in Moga Mobo’s Comic Anthology Nothing New in the East (2023)
• Kai Mikkonen (University of Helsinki): Drawing Chernobyl: Comparing Emmanuel Lepage’s Springtime in Chernobyl (Un printemps à Chernobyl, 2012) and Johanna Aulén’s Chernobyl’s Dogs (Tšernobylin koirat, 2022)  (online)                        

11.30
Venue: Room 40406, GeiWi-Turm, Innrain 52

Panel 2: Mapping Eastern Europe in Comics
Chair: Svitlana Pidoprygora (University of Innsbruck)

• Kees Ribbens (NIOD Institute of War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies): The Least Unfamiliar “Other” or the Most Familiar “Relative”? Conceptualizing Eastern Europe in Dutch and Belgian Comics from the 1930s till the Early 1990s
• Ralf Kauranen (University of Turku): War and Other, Lesser Encounters: Russia/the USSR in Finnish Comics (online)                        

15.00
Venue: Room 40406, GeiWi-Turm, Innrain 52

Panel 3: Witnessing War: Violence, Trauma, and Visual Narratives
Chair: Matthias Schwartz (ZfL)

• Pramod K. Nayar (University of Hyderabad): Sights, Sounds, Signs and the Story of an Invasion: Igort’s How War Begins (online)
• Constance Uzwyshyn (University of Cambridge): Tardigrade vs. Dragon: Slow Violence, Fast War in Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
• Svitlana Pidoprygora (University of Innsbruck): When Comics Teach about War Trauma: Ukrainian Graphic Narratives of Disability
                          

17.30
University Library Exhibition Opening
Venue: Main Library / New Building, Innrain 52f

Do Comics Matter? Featuring literature from the ULB Tirol collection

 

Friday, 23 Oct 2026

9.30
Venue: Room 40406, GeiWi-Turm, Innrain 52

Panel 4: Contemporary Ukrainian Malopys / Comics: Trends, War, Horror, and History
Chair: Gernot Howanitz (University of Innsbruck)

• Svitlana Stupak (University of Siegen): Ukraine in Pictures: Mapping out Current Trends in Malopys (CBR)
• Victoria Yefymenko (Taras Sevchenko National University of Kyiv): From Shelter to History: Multimodal Storytelling in A Brief History of a Long War of Ukraine with russia

11.30
Venue: Room 40406, GeiWi-Turm, Innrain 52

Panel 5: Politics of Representation: Memory, Post-Socialism, and War
Chair: Magdalena Kaltseis (University of Innsbruck)

• José Alaniz (University of Washington): Post-Socialist Gothic and Czech Architecture Comics
• Gernot Howanitz (University of Innsbruck): Before Maus, but also after: Ukrainian Visual Holocaust Narratives and the Politics of Representation
• Anastasia Ulanowicz (University of Florida): “Why Do We Need Comics If Russia Is Not in Them?” The Rhetoric of Both-Sideism in Western Comics Representations of the Russia–Ukraine War             

17.00
Venue: Hörsaal 5¾, Geiwi-Turm, Erdgeschoß, Innrain 52e

Discussion and Q&A with Ruslana Koropetska and Bohdan Kordoba
Moderator: Svitlana Pidoprygora (University of Innsbruck)

Publishing Comics in Wartime: What to Publish and How – The UA Comix Case         

18.30               
Closing Remarks

 

https://www.zfl-berlin.org/event/eastern-europe-in-comics-perspectives-from-within-and-beyond.html

RLJ’s Call for Special Issue Proposals for 2028

Russian Language Journal (RLJ) invites proposals for special issues for 2028 exploring timely and innovative topics in Slavic linguistics and language teaching.

We particularly welcome proposals addressing Russian language program direction, technology and AI in teaching Russian and East European languages, study abroad programming for Russian and other East European languages, integrating literature and literary texts in language teaching, arts, crafts, and arts-based Russian language teaching, and community-based and experiential approaches to languages teaching. We welcome diverse methodologies and perspectives that advance scholarship and practice. . Proposals on other relevant topics are also encouraged.

Prospective guest editors are invited to submit a proposal that includes:

• Name(s) and affiliation(s) of guest editor(s)

• Proposed topic and rationale (500–750 words)

• Short CV(s) highlighting relevant research and editorial experience

• Draft Call for Papers

Special issues may include research studies, conceptual papers, pedagogical reports, forum columns, and state-of-the-art scholarship reviews.

Proposals and informal inquiries should be sent to rljeditor@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is December 1, 2026. All proposals will be reviewed by the RLJ Editorial Team. 

For complete details, please visit: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/rlj/call_for_proposals.html

We encourage interested colleagues to consider submitting a proposal and to share this opportunity with others.

Job opening Portland State University: Flagship Program Coordinator

The Russian Flagship Program at Portland State University is accepting applications for the full-time position of Flagship Coordinator. The Coordinator supports and promotes the PSU Russian Flagship Program, whose mission is to encourage undergraduate students of any major to develop professional level fluency in Russian. In consultation with the Flagship Program Director, the Program Coordinator manages the Russian Flagship’s daily operations. In collaboration with Flagship Program Director and the Russian faculty, the Program Coordinator recruits and advises students about the program. Additional details about the position, the Program, and the University can be found at: https://jobs.hrc.pdx.edu/postings/50732

Review of applications will begin October 26 and continue until the position is filled. Questions about the position can be addressed to: Professor William Comer, Director of the Russian Flagship Program (russflag@pdx.edu).

Call for articles: Slavonic-Indian connections

I have the pleasure of sharing with you the following publishing opportunity in Slavonica  in the field of  Slavonic /East European --Indian cultural connections. We look forward to hearing from colleagues with an interest in such interactions and cultural exchanges. 

Practical information

An abstract of 300–500 words (excluding the bibliography) and a 100-word biographical note should be sent to the Guest Editors no later than 31 October 2026. Selected authors will be invited to prepare full articles, which should be sent to the Guest Editors by 28 February 2027. After receiving feedback from the Guest Editors, authors should submit their revised papers via the Taylor & Francis submission system by 30 April 2027.

Description

In this special issue of Slavonica (https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/ysla20), we invite scholars to examine the development of Eastern European encounters with India, following the call of ESIND – COST Action CA23144, “Europe’s Representations of India: Texts, Images, and Encounters”. As India and Europe are becoming increasingly important to each other as economic, political, and strategic partners, it is crucial to gain insight into the cultural history of European encounters with India, the ways in which Europeans have understood the subcontinent and its civilisation, and how these understandings have shaped their interactions with Indians in the past and present. Whereas contacts between India and Western European colonial powers have already been the subject of extensive study, there are significant gaps in our knowledge of interactions between Eastern Europe and India. By investigating such connections, the special issue will contribute to current debates on decentring comparative studies, the place of ‘non-colonial’ societies in transimperial history, and cross-cultural exchanges beyond the Western core of the world-system. Such an approach may also necessitate a re-examination of postcolonial theory and the concept of Orientalism as applied to the study of Indian-European exchanges.

We invite contributions that investigate both the cultural history of exchanges between India and Eastern Europe, such as travel between India and Eastern Europe and contacts in politics, culture, and the arts, and representations of India in Eastern European countries. The special issue will bring together perspectives from various disciplines, including literature, cultural studies, and political science. In this way, we intend to provide a broad panorama of Eastern European encounters with India.

Special issue editors: 

Zsuzsanna Varga, University of Glasgow, zsuzsanna.varga@glasgow.ac.uk
Nemanja Radulović, University of Belgrade, nem_radulovic@yahoo.com
Tomasz Ewertowski, Shanghai International Studies University, tewert@shisu.edu.cn

CFP Slavic Studies Reconsidered: Scholarly Practices and Manifestos. Princeton, 1-2 May, 2027

On behalf of the conference organizing committee, we pleased to share the call for paper for the international conference "Slavic Studies Reconsidered. Scholarly Practices and Manifestos", which will take place in Princeton on May 1-2, 2027.

Please send a title, an abstract, and your CV to  Lidia Tripiccione (lidiat@princeton.edu) by January 5, 2027. 

Organizing Committee:  Professor Michael Brinley Professor Lidia Tripiccione  Professor Ilya Vinitsky

The history of an academic discipline can be studied in different ways and to different ends. Existing scholarship on the establishment and development of Slavic Studies in different countries has traditionally focused on the reconstruction of those macroscopic historical, institutional, and political circumstances that have helped or hindered the growth of the field (Manning 1959, Engerman 2009, Hamm and Wytrzens 1985). In this sense, the history of the discipline is interpreted as the history of a series of institutions, funded and influenced by macroactors, like major philanthropic institutions or major historical events, and led by a few scholars-pioneers.  

This conference contributes to the growing interest in the study of the history Slavic Studies by fostering approaches that are historically situated but that do not reduce the topic it to a mirror of broader historical or political changes. Recent studies have privileged, for instance, the activity of individual scholars, such as André Mazon, Dmytro Chizhev’sky, Renato Poggioli and Matija Murko (Depretto 2023, Diddi and Sulpasso 2024, Babak and Frank 2026, Zabel 2025), thus highlighing the complexity of specific scholarly environments and their national and international connections and resonance. This “microhistorical” focus can also open to the study of scholarly practices, understood broadly to encompass ways of structuring and fostering scholarly discussion and research, teaching methodologies or pedagogical credos, as well as what Robert K. Merton called “scientific microenvironments”, such as circles, summer schools, informal networks of scholarly exchanges, etc. For example, Igor Pil’shchikov’s recent study on Yuri Lotman’s academic domesticity (2026), builds on an explicit parallel with Eikhenbaum’s notion of literary domesticity (literaturnaia domashnost’) and focuses on the scholarly habitus that Lotman's teaching and research practices stimulated in the late Soviet period.  

The conference also seeks center text-oriented approaches to the history of the field focusing on what one can term, again by analogy with the study of literature and the arts, “scholarly manifestos.” Much in the same way as literary and artistic manifestos have programmatic strength, so some scholarly texts, like Roman Jakobson’s “Linguistics and Poetics” (1960) also mean to lay out a path for further studies, something that can resonate (or be at odds) with broader historical and political circumstances or with developments in other disciplines. Furthermore, scholarly manifestos too are useful to bring attention to contentious ideas and polemics within the field.  

We invite contributions considering the history of Slavic Studies, especially during the interwar period and the Cold War – in any national context or from an international angle -- from the perspective of scholarly practices and manifestos. Abstracts should be in English, no longer than 500 words, and relate broadly to one of the categories described below. The working language of the conference will be English.  

1. Microhistory, Microenvironments, and Practices 

• The structure of scholarly circles, seminars, conferences, summer schools, and informal networks and the scholarly practices that they produced. 
• "Academic domesticity”, pedagogical practices, teaching traditions, mentorship, and the transmission of knowledge. 
• The relationship between formal institutional structures and informal scholarly communities. 
• “Academic scandals and enmities” and their influence on the development of scholarly centers.  
• Émigré scholars and their integration (or lack thereof) in foreign scholarly contexts, as well as the formation of academic institutions in exile.  
• The adaptation and resistance strategies of scholars working in autocratic or totalitarian contexts.

2. Manifestos  

This category considers texts through which scholars sought to define or contest the direction of Slavic Studies. Possible topics include: 

• Foundational or disciplinary texts (or collections of texts) that sought to define the object and methods of Slavic Studies. 
• Debates over comparative, national, transnational, and interdisciplinary approaches, and the competing vision of what Slavic Studies should encompass, as well as attempts to redefine or dismantle disciplinary boundaries. 
• Debates on the relationship between Slavic Studies and other disciplines, both cognate (comparative literature, other national philologies) and not (scientific disciplines). 
• Methodological “turns” and moments of disciplinary reorientation. 
• The relationship between manifestos and the actual trajectory of the scholarly discourse. 
• The relationship between manifestos and the political or cultural contexts in which they were written/published.