Lecture format: on site + online.
Room: 2R-EG-07 (lecture hall of the Institute for Eastern European History).
Street address: Spitalgasse 2,  Campus of the University of Vienna, Hof 3.

The Transformative Seminar is going to be a very first exploration of a new research project: a history of emotions relating to a ‘long’ Perestroika, defining Perestroika here as a process that lasted from late socialism into the 1990s.

The importance of emotions in this period is well-documented, not only because they play such an important role in the recollections of well-known and lesser well-known actors, but also because the very definition of many emotional changed in public discourse as part of the transformation of society during those years. I will look at two case studies – both very preliminary – in order to demonstrate the processes that propelled change as well as those that inhibited it.

The first is an exploration of the rise of the term ‘trauma’ and the transnational forces that shaped it into a powerful tool to describe both collective and individual experiences across the 1991 divide. The second is the notion of ‘beauty’ that was intertwined with the notion of ‘freedom’ but developed into a number of unforeseen directions. Both case studies will argue that Perestroika and transformation have to be considered as part of larger histories and re-integrated into the arguments and theories developed for late socialism.

Juliane Fürst is head of the department ‘Communism and Society’ at the Centre of Contemporary History at Potsdam, lecturer at the Humboldt University in Berlin and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. She has recently published a monograph on the Soviet Hippie movement titled Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in the Soviet Hippieland(OUP, 2021). She is also the author of Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Late Socialism and the editor of Dropping Out of Socialism: Alternative Spheres in the Soviet Bloc (Lexington, 2016) and The Cambridge History of Communism Vol. III (2017). For the next five years she will be leading the ERC-funded project ‘Perestroika from below: Participation, Biography and Emotional Communities 1980-1999’.

Registration is requested only from those guests who would like to be connected via Zoom. Please feel free to visit the seminar without registration if you plan to take part live.