Lecture format: on site
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.
This Transformative Seminar will feature the book launch of Intellectual Production in Socialist Europe 1956-1968. Ideas in Flux (Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics 71), Brill 2025 with its editors Aleksandra Konarzewska, Una Blagojević, and Natalia Borisova, followed by a discussion.
Between the Thaw and the Prague Spring, Socialist Europe experienced a brief yet intense period of intellectual ferment. Intellectual Production in Socialist Europe 1956-1968 explores the shifting landscape of literature, philosophy, literary theory, and political thought in the wake of Stalinism and on the cusp of postmodernism. Bridging cultural analysis and intellectual history, this volume offers fresh insights into a period that shaped Socialist Europe for decades.
Una Blagojevic earned her PhD in Comparative History from Central European University, Vienna. Her dissertation explored the intellectual history of Marxist Humanism and the concept of the human in the face of crisis. Currently, she is a junior fellow at KFG "Universalism and Particularism in European Contemporary History," LMU, Munich.
Natalia Borisova is a scholar of Slavic Studies, having earned her PhD from the University of Konstanz in 2008 with a dissertation titled With Heart and Eye: Love in Soviet Film and Literature. Her postdoctoral (Habilitation) research focused on Efficiency and Perfection: Lev Tolstoy's Ethics of Self-Optimization and Its European and American Sources. From 2015 to 2023, she was a fellow of the Margarethe von Wrangell Program of the State of Baden-Württemberg and served as a research assistant in literature and cultural studies at the Slavic Seminar of the University of Tübingen. Her research interests include 19th- and 20th-century Russian and Polish literature, Russian and Polish film, and gulag literature.
Aleksandra Konarzewska is a literary scholar and historian of ideas of East-Central Europe. She works at the Institute of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Tübingen (Germany), where she is the Principal Investigator of the DFG-funded project Historytelling. Narrating the Past in Contemporary Polish Gonzo Literature (2021–2026). Recently, she published the monograph Gombrowicz. An Introduction (Routledge, 2024).
This event is organized in cooperation with the ERC Project HERESSEE.
