Monday 25 September 2023, 9am - 6pm
Seminar Room, Radcliffe Humanities Building
Decentering and Digitizing Soviet and Post-Soviet Research
International Workshop
Provisional Program
9am: Arrival and welcome
9:15-10:45am: State Archives I (chair: Polly Jones)
Igor Casu (National Agency for Archives/State University of Moldova), ‘The Soviet Past and the Second Archival Revolution in Moldova, 2022-2023: Context, Goals, and Moral Implications’
Siobhan Hearne (Manchester), ‘Researching Russian Imperial and Soviet History in Baltic Archives’
Andriy Kohut (Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine; zoom), ‘Digital KGB Archives: The Case of Ukraine'
10:45-11:10am: Coffee
11:10-12:40. Digitization (chair: Jake Robertson)
Eleanor Peers (Oxford), ‘Changing correspondence: digital resourcing at the Bodleian and beyond.’
David Zeitlyn (Oxford) ‘Digital research methods: how to use qualitative archival research methods to swim in a sea of quantitative sharks’
Sarah Young (UCL-SSEES), ‘Making a Virtue out of Necessity? Reflections on the development of a distant reading methodology’
12:40-1:30pm: Lunch
1:30-2:45pm: Working with non-State archives and sources (chair: Jake Robertson)
Susanne Schattenberg (Bremen; zoom) ‘“Why Bremen?“ The Research Centre for East European Studies and its unique archive of samizdat and dissidents’ collections’
Iryna Sklokina/Ivanna Cherchovych (Lviv Center for Urban History; zoom), ‘Urban Media Archive and Educational Platform (Center for Urban History in Lviv, Ukraine)’
2:45-3:15pm: Coffee
3:15-4:45pm State Archives II (chair: Zbig Wojnowski)
Tim Blauvelt (Ilia State University/American Councils for International Education, Georgia), ‘Primary Sources for Russian Imperial and Soviet History Research in Georgia’
Beatrice Penati (Liverpool), ‘Researching the colonial and Soviet period in the National Archive of Uzbekistan’
Alexandra Sukalo (Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey; zoom), ‘Uncovering the Secrets of Soviet Control: Political Police Records in the Western Republics’
4:45-6pm Roundtable: Decentering Research Agendas
Led by Pavel Stepanov (Cambridge), Ksenia Butuzova (Oxford), Petr Budrin (QMUL)
Workshop organisers: Polly Jones, Jake Robertson, Zbig Wojnowski.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of University College; the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages; the History Faculty; and TORCH.
Please send any enquiries to: rethinking.spsr@torch.ox.ac.uk.
Part of the TORCH Critical-Thinking Communities project.
