REES Seminar Activities, 2011-12

Events for 2011-12

Monday, 14 November 2011

Research Seminar organised by the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures (RICC) and the Institute for Transnational Studies (ITS)
Time: 16:00-17:30
Venue: University Place, room 5.210

Speaker: Dr Dirk Uffelmann (University of Passau)

'Wrong Sex and the City: Polish Migration and Masculinity'

This paper aims to discuss challenges to traditional models of masculinity in the wake of migration to Western metropolises. Drawing on examples from recent literary production by (and about) Polish migrants to Germany (Becker, Knapp, Muszer, Rudnicki), the UK (Bolec, Koziarski, Kropiwnicki, Sedzikowski) and Ireland (Wojnarowski), it explores how male migrants are deprived of (seemingly) secure masculine roles when confronted with a subaltern position as unskilled migrant workers. Special attention is paid to the modes of literary compensation for subalternity: carnivalisation (Bakhtin), the picaresque hero, mimicry (Bhabha), Signifying (Gates), self-orientalisation (Khalid) and so on.

Dirk Uffelmann (uffelmann@uni-passau.de) studied Russian, Polish, Czech and German Literature at the Universities of Tübingen, Vienna, Warsaw, and Constance. He obtained his PhD from the University of Constance in 1999 and defended his second thesis (Habilitation) at the University of Bremen in 2005 before teaching as Lecturer in Russian at the University of Edinburgh. At present, he is full professor of Slavic Literatures and Cultures at the University of Passau. His research interests are Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Central Asian literature, philosophy, religion, migration and internet studies. He is co-editor of the journal Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie as Postcolonial Perspectives on Eastern Europe and Polonistik im Kontext.

Thursday, 24 November 2011

Time: 16:15-17:15

Venue: Samuel Alexander Building, room A112

Speaker: Stephen Ennis (BBC Monitoring, Caversham)

'The Rebirth of the Russian Protest Song'