Faculty of the Harriman Institute

Faculty News

There will be a memorial service for Robert Maguire in New York on Thursday, September 15, 2005, beginning with a mass at the Church of Notre Dame (Morningside Drive and W. 114th St.) at 9:45 a.m., followed by a service at St. Paul's Chapel (on the Columbia Campus) at 11:00 a.m. The Slavic Department and the Harriman Institute will be hosting an informal gathering afterward. I hope that the many of you who have written to express your sadness and to inquire about a memorial will be able to
attend.
Cathy Popkin
Chair
Department of Slavic Languages
Columbia University

Rafis Abazov (Adjunct Visiting Professor) recently published his Historical Dictionary of Turkmenistan (Scarecrow Press, 2005). He presented his book and his research on recent economic development in Turkmenistan at the Harriman Institute in February 2005. Abazov is currently putting the final touches on his “ Tajikistan” (Cultures of the World series) and plans to work on cultural development in other Central Asian republics.

Bradley Abrams (History; Associate Director, Harriman Institute) was one of three Graduate School of Arts and Sciences faculty members recognized for their work with graduate students. The Graduate Student Advisory Council awarded him Honorable Mention in its naming of recipients of the Faculty Mentoring Award. The awards will be presented at a banquet in the fall.

Ivan Sanders (Hungarian, Slavic) presented papers at conferences commemorating the 60th anniversary of the deportation of Hungarian Jews, held in Washington’s Holocaust Museum and at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest in March and April 2004, respectively. Sanders also participated in a symposium on Imre Kertesz (Indiana University) and one on the works of Sandor Marai ( Cambridge University). His review article on a new English translation of Karoly Pap’s novel Azarel appeared in the Winter 2004 issue of the Hungarian Quarterly. Sanders is one of the three judges on the jury for the Pen/Book of the Month Club Translation Prize.

Alexander Cooley’s (Political Science, Barnard) book, The Logic of Hierarchy: The Organization of Empires, States and Military Occupations, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press (fall 2005). The main empirical focus is the Soviet and post-Soviet administration of Central Asia and its legacies.

Anna Frajlich-Zajac (Slavic) gave readings of her poetry at the Szczecin Society, the Shevchenko Scientific Society, and the Europa Club ( Brooklyn). She participated and helped organize a number of tributes to Czeslaw Milosz, including those held by the Polish American Daily, the Brooklyn Public Library, Columbia, and the Kosciuszko Foundation. Her new publications include an essay on the Robert Frost Museum and her reminiscences of Milosz, both published in Przeglad Polski. She presented a paper on Shakespearean motifs in the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska at the 2004 AAASEEL convention, where she also participated in a panel discussion on models of instruction in teaching Polish language and gave a reading of her own poetry. A master’s thesis on Frajlich’s poetry has been defended in her native Poland, a doctoral dissertation is in the works.

Boris Gasparov (Slavic), together with Visiting Professor Alan Timberlake (University of California, Berkeley) organized a one-day symposium devoted to The Tale of Prince Igor’s Campaign, the epic of twelfth-century Rus (March 23, 2005). The event was co-sponsored by the Harriman Institute.

Leopold H. Haimson’s (History, Emeritus) new book, Russia’s Revolutionary Experience, 1905-1917: Two Essays is forthcoming from Columbia University Press (May 2005). See page 11 for announcement of seminar devoted to Professor Haimson’s recent works.

Mara Kashper (Slavic, Barnard) is co-author, with Olga Kagan and Yuliya Morozova, of Cinema for Russian Conversation, published by Focus in 2005. It is the first of a two-volume project designed to facilitate discussion in Russian of Russian-language films.

Christina Kiaer’s (Art History) book, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism is forthcoming from The MIT Press in December 2005.

Robert Legvold (Political Science) has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is co-editor, with Bruno Coppieters (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), of Statehood and Security: Georgia after the Rose Revolution, to be published by The MIT Press in September 2005. Russian and Georgian translations of the work are in progress.

John A. McGuckin (Religion) is the author of two new books, both published in 2004: Handbook to Patristic Theology (WJK Press) and St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy (SVS Press). He was awarded the Henry Luce III Fellowship in Theology, for a full year’s sabbatical research leave (2006).

The U.S. edition of Robert A. Maguire’s (Slavic, Emeritus) translation of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls was released earlier this year by Penguin.

Kimberly Marten and Alexander Cooley (both Political Science, Barnard) published an op-ed piece in the International Herald Tribune, entitled “Permanent Military Bases Won’t Work in Iraq,” which reflected the research they did about the U.S. air base at Manas in Kyrgyzstan in January (February 3, 2005). Marten’s book, Enforcing the Peace: Learning from the Imperial Past, was published by Columbia University Press in 2004.

Ronald Meyer (Slavic) translated a selection from Mikhail Kozakov’s A Man Is Brought to His Knees for An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry, edited by M. Shrayer, to be published by M. E. Sharpe next year. Students in his class on Russian literary translation contributed translations of works by Vasily Grossman, Yury Karabchievsky and Andrei Sobol to the same anthology. Meyer was commissioned by the Atlantic Theater Co. to translate Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard for playwright Tom Donaghy. Donaghy’s adaptation of the work opens in June.

John S. Micgiel (HI Associate Director) convened several meetings at Columbia, including Paderewski Seminar on “The U.S. and Poland: A Special Relationship,” held in September 2004, and a “Teach Europe Workshop” for high school educators, held in October 2004. John lectured at a Polish Educators’ Conference, sponsored by the Polish American Congress’ Educational Commission in February 2005, and again offered courses this spring at the Higher School of Business-National Louis University in Nowy Sacz, Poland. Together with Glenda Rosenthal, Micgiel edited The Changing Face of Transatlantic Relations (Institute for the Study of Europe, 2004).

Catharine Nepomnyashchy (Director, Harriman Institute) is President of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. This past spring semester she co-taught a new course on “The New Post-Coloniality” with Charles Amstrong (History). She is teaching a course on the “Great Russian Novel” for the Russian Practicum this summer session. Nepomnyashchy’s article “’Imperially, my dear Watson’: Sherlock Holmes and the Decline of the Soviet Empire” appears in Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 1900-2001, edited by S. Hutchings & A. Vernitski (Routledge, 2005).

Jenik Radon (Adjunct Prof., Intl. & Public Affairs) taught as a Visiting Professor an inaugural class in January 2005 on the “Dynamics of Corruption” at the Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research in Mumbai, India. Radon organized and sponsored during summer 2004 a group of six graduate students from SIPA, Stanford and NYU Law Schools and the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth, as part of the Eesti-Eurasian Public Service Fellowship of Columbia, to intern with ministries and public organizations in the Republic of Georgia, including the Ministries of Economy and state-owned enterprise, Georgian International Oil Corporation (GIOC), responsible for negotiating and overseeing the construction of the multi-billion oil pipeline from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey. On behalf of the Republic of Georgia, Radon settled a dispute concerning the satisfaction of environmental construction conditions in the ecologically sensitive Borjomi area of Georgia, an area famed for its spring water, imposed in the construction permit issued to the oil consortium led by BP in respect of the construction of the multi-billion oil pipeline. He published the chapter, “The ABCs of Oil Contracts: License-Concession Agreements, Joint Ventures and Production Sharing Agreements” in Covering Energy and Development: A Reporter's Handbook—a collaborative work between the Revenue Watch program of the Open Society Institute and the Initiative for Policy Dialogue.

Peter J. Sinnott, Lecturer, Harriman & Middle East Institutes, 1115 IAB published “ Russia from Empire to Revolution: The Illusion of the emerging Nation-State in the South Caucasus and Beyond,” in The Creation of Iraq 1914-1921, Reeva Simon & Eleanor Tejirian (eds.), Columbia University Press 2004. He organized a conference, Aspects of Social Change in Central Asia at Columbia on March 24 th. A lecture series, which built upon the conference, Political and Popular Opposition in Central Asia held November 18 th, continued throughout the semester and extended into the summer and fall semesters.

On October 26 th another Caspian project conference is scheduled with the theme, Reassessing the Caspian: Development and its Impediments. Extensive work on a festschrift honoring Professor Edward Allworth should be completed by the spring.

Jack Snyder’s (Political Science) new publications include “One World, Rival Theories,” Foreign Policy (Nov.-Dec. 2004); Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War, co-authored with Edward Mansfield (MIT Press, forthcoming in 2005), and “Myths of Empire and Strategies of Hegemony,” in Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper and Kevin Moore, eds., Lessons of Empire (New Press, 2005), revised as “Mythes d'empire et stratégies dhégémonie,” for Critique internationale (Jan. 2005).

Michael Stanislawski (History) is the author of the book, Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning, published by University of Washington Press (2004).

David Stark (Sociology) was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation for his project on “Technologies of Civil Society in East Central Europe.” His recent publications include “Organizing Technologies: Genre Forms of Online Civic Association in Eastern Europe” (with Balazs Vedres and Laszlo Bruszt), in Eric Klinenberg, ed., Cultural Production in a Digital Age, special issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2004) and “Link, Search, Interact: The Co-evolution of NGOs and Interactive Technologies” (with Jonathan Bach), Theory Culture and Society (2004). Recent conference presentations: “Cognition and Re-Cognition,” Conference on Cognition and Innovation, Fondazione Cini, Venice, September 2004; “Economic Sociology and the Future of the Social Sciences,” Conference on “The Future of the Social Sciences,” organized by Douglass North, Washington University in St. Louis, October 9, 2004; “Social Times of Network Spaces: Sequence Analysis of Network Formation and Foreign Investment in Hungary” (with Balazs Vedres) Presented at the International Research Conference, Harvard Business School, October 2004.

Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier (HI Resident Scholar) lectured on Russian realist art at Yale University and Manhattanville College. Her essay on the correspondence between her father, Manfred Kridl, and Maria Renata Mayenova, his student from before World War II and a noted semiotics scholar after the war, is being published in a memorial volume on Mayenova ( Bialystok University, 2005).

Richard Wortman (History) delivered a paper, “The Russian Coronation: Rite and Ritual” at the Coronation Conference in March 2004, held by the Society for Court Studies in London; the paper appeared in The Court Historian (vol. 9, no. 1). Three volumes of Wortman’s appeared in Russian translation in Moscow last year: The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness was published under the title, Vlastiteli i sudii: razvitie pravovogo soznaniia v imperatorskoi Rossii, by NLO press; both volumes of the prize-winning Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy were published by OGI Press.