On Tuesday, September 16, 5:00-7:00 p.m. (CDT), the Romanoff Center will sponsor a zoom forum on the viral literary sensation Pioneer Summer, a young adult romance by Elena Malisova and Kateryna Sylvanova that took Book Tok by storm and prompted a new Russian crackdown on LGBTQ+ representation. This event will be moderated by Eliot Borenstein, professor of Russian and Cultural Studies at NYU, and will include the participation of Anne O. Fisher, the translator of the novel; Julie A. Cassiday, professor of Russian and Gender Studies at Williams College; and Rustam Alexander, historian and author of Red Closet: The Hidden History of Gay Oppression in the USSR. Register for the event here.
On Thursday, September 25, 4:30-5:30 p.m. in the Zarrow Hall Community Room, Mr. Nick Nicholson, Director of Russian Art and Artworks at Heritage Auctions and authority on Russian émigré collections, will deliver a lecture titled "Accidental Curators: The Descendants of Prince Nikita Alexandrovich of Russia" to coincide with the opening of the exhibit of materials from OU's Romanoff Archival Collection, which will be on display in Bizzell Library from September 2025 to February 2026.
On Thursday, September 25, an exhibit of materials from OU's Romanoff Archival Collection titled "Russia's Romanovs in War, Revolution, and Exile, 1916-2016: Stories from a Family Archive" will open in Bizzell Library in the first-floor exhibition space. This exhibit will give the public a glimpse of some of the important archival materials that OU acquired along with the initial Romanoff Family bequest as well as additional materials acquired in subsequent years. The Romanoff collection includes hundreds of family photos as well as diaries and correspondence from both the Revolutionary period and later decades. The exhibit was prepared by Dr. Melissa Stockdale, Brian and Sandra O'Brien Professor of history at OU, and James Burnes, Exhibitions Coordinator for the OU libraries. The exhibit will run until February 2026 and will be open to the public during regular library hours.
Noted Russian-language poet and literary scholar Dr. Polina Barskova will visit OU in October as a member of the Neustadt Prize jury. Dr. Barskova will participate in a poetry reading by Neustadt jurors on Tuesday, October 21, 4:30-5:45 p.m. in the Scholars Room (OMU 315). She will deliver a lecture titled "The Siege of Leningrad Narrated to Western Audiences: Harrison Salisbury and his Hidden Sources" on Wednesday, October 22, 12:30-2:00 p.m. in Kaufman 221B (NOTE NEW TIME). Dr. Barskova is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley and the author of Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster (2016). She has published highly regarded volumes of poetry, including The Zoo in Winter (2011) and Relocations (2013). NYRB released Living Pictures, a book of free-form essays on the siege of Leningrad by Barskova, in 2022. Barskova was a nominee for both the Debut Prize and the Andrei Bely Prize in Russia.
OU alumnus Grant Slater (BAs in Russian and Journalism, 2006) will visit OU as a TW Adams Distinguished Alumni Lecturer on October 30, 20205. He will give a talk on his career at 4:30 p.m. on October 30 in the Zarrow Community Room. Grant Slater graduated from OU in spring 2006 with BAs in Russian and Journalism. He has since gone on to an illustrious and varied career in journalism. After completing an internship with the White House Press Corps, Grant received a full scholarship to Northwestern University for their prestigious MA program in journalism, which he completed in 2010. He then spent a number of years in Eastern Europe and the Middle East as a free-lance reporter for the New York Times, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, and NPR. After returning to the US, he began working as a documentary filmmaker and producing video and audio material for a variety of outlets. Most recently, he has produced podcasts, including Maejor Frequency, which received awards as “podcast of the year” and “best new podcast” from Adweek Magazine and Variety respectively in 2022. Grant’s documentary film Mammoth, which was produced in conjunction with The Atlantic, was displayed at the Guggenheim Museum in 2021. His film The County won an Edward R. Murrow Award for Investigative Journalism and was a finalist for a Peabody award.
