7th Annual Templeton Lecture with Professor Edyta Bojanowska

7th Annual Alan Templeton Distinguished Speaker series for Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Hosted by the Department of German and Russian

“The Imperial World through Russian Eyes: Colonialism, Globalization, and a Russian Naval Voyage around Africa and Asia”

How did the nineteenth century world shaped by western colonial empires look to contemporary Russian observers? In answering this question, the talk follows a mid-century Russian naval voyage around the coastal rims of southern Africa and Asia, part of an official government mission to open Japan to European trade. In the extensive network of Euro-American imperialism’s global connections, the Russians see the emergence of a new world order, one in which they must compete and cooperate with their western rivals, to learn from them, but also to set their own empire apart.

About The Speaker:

Edyta M. Bojanowska is Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University with a secondary appointment in the Department of History. She also chairs the European Studies Council at Yale’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. She is the author of two prize-winning monographs about empire and nationalism in nineteenth-century Russian literature and intellectual history. Her first book, Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism (Harvard, 2007) challenges the Russocentric myths around this Ukrainian-born Russophone writer. Her recent A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada (Belknap, 2018) uses Ivan Goncharov’s travelogue as a lens onto global imperial history and Russian colonial imagination. An effort to integrate Russia into accounts of European imperialism connects this book with Professor Bojanowska’s current project, Empire and the Russian Classics, which explores imperial themes in the works of major nineteenth-century Russian writers. Her scholarship has been supported by the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Harvard Society of Fellows.

• Everyone is required to wear face coverings indoors, regardless of vaccination status.
• Masks are required during social component but not when actively eating or drinking.
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• Attendees coming from off-campus must complete the Visitor Daily Symptom Survey

Host or Publisher Languages and Literatures