Tom Parfitt – High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia’s Haunted Hinterland

Tuesday, 3 December, 5pm

Earlham Hall 0.12

A stunning memoir of the 1,000-mile walk journalist Tom Parfitt made across Russia’s Caucasus mountains to lay to rest a ghost – confronting trauma through connection with history, people and place.

On 1st September 2004, Chechen and Ingush militants took more than a thousand people captive at a school in the Caucasus region of southern Russia. Working as a correspondent, Tom Parfitt witnessed the bloody climax in which 334 hostages died, more than half of them children. The experience left Tom emotionally shredded, struggling to find a way to return to his life in Moscow and put to rest the ghosts of the Beslan siege. Having long been fascinated by the mountainous North Caucasus, Tom turned to his love of walking as a source of both recuperation and discovery. In High Caucasus, he shares his remarkable thousand-mile quest in search of personal peace – and a greater understanding of the roots of violence in a region whose fate has tragic parallels with the Ukraine of today. Starting his journey in Sochi on the Black Sea and walking the mountain ranges to Derbent, the ancient fortress city on the Caspian, Tom traverses the political, religious and ethnic fault-lines of seven Russian republics, including Chechnya and Dagestan. Through bear-haunted forests, across high altitude pastures and over the shoulders of Elbrus, Europe’s highest mountain, he finds companionship and respite in the homes of proud, little-known peoples. Walking exerts a restorative power; it also provides a unique, ground-level view of a troubled yet exquisite corner of the world.

Dr Nadine Willems - From the Ground Up: Japan’s Siberian Intervention of 1918-1922 from the Perspective of Infantryman Takeuchi Tadao

Tuesday, 30 April, 17.30 – 19.00

Earlham Hall 0.12

All Welcome

East European refreshments provided

Japan’s Siberian Intervention was the nation’s most significant strategic and political failure between the Russo-Japanese War and the Asia-Pacific War. While historians have focused on its military and diplomatic aspects, the individual experiences of soldiers in this messy “forgotten war” remain little explored. This talk foregrounds the perspective of ordinary Japanese soldiers dispatched to Siberia between 1918 and 1922. In particular, it draws on archival material left by Takeuchi Tadao, a conscripted farmer who spent six months in the Russian Far East in 1920. A talented artist, Takeuchi produced two richly illustrated accounts, the only examples of non-photographic visual narratives of the Intervention available today. These provide a unique view of the conflict “from below.” For the higher echelons of the Imperial Japanese Army, the occupation of Siberia had the potential to increase Japan’s influence in Northeast Asia, and to showcase the army’s might and efficiency. To the rank-and-file servicemen, however, the rationale for combat was unclear. Their frustrations were compounded by impossible logistics, excruciating cold, and uncertain allegiances in a zone of lawlessness and brutality. Mounting public opposition at home and the failing military strategy in Siberia made 1920 an especially challenging time. Takeuchi Tadao’s records reveal an implicit criticism of the Siberian operations, highlighting the strategic and situational confusion surrounding them, and hence the prospect of a meaningless death that confronted ordinary soldiers in Siberia that year.

Nadine Willems is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese History at the University of East Anglia. She is an intellectual and cultural historian and the author of Ishikawa Sanshirō’s Geographical Imagination: Transnational Anarchism and the Reconfiguration of Everyday Life in Early Twentieth Century Japan (Leiden University Press, 2020).

Language Contact, Translation and Translingual Reading

Julie Hansen
(Uppsala Universitet, Uppsala)

21 February 2024 (Wednesday) at 9:00 GMT
Venue: Institute of World Literature SAS + online

Co-hosted with the Institute of World Literature SAS, Bratislava

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88160376952?pwd=bfArZjYZyLNaoQB5fDEaeeIEzRLRUf.1
Meeting ID: 881 6037 6952
Passcode: 360609

In this book launch seminar, Julie Hansen will present her new monograph Reading Novels Translingually: Twenty-First-Century Case Studies (Academic Studies Press, 2024); soon available in full open access here: https://www.academicstudiespress.com/9781644698778/reading-novels-translingually/

This book analyzes how literary fiction depicts multilingual worlds by incorporating multiple languages into the text. Taking as case studies several contemporary novels as well as Leo Tolstoy’s nineteenth-century classic War and Peace, it explores how reading can become a translingual process. The seminar will focus specifically on the nexus of literary multilingualism, translation and the reading process, exemplified with some of the case studies analyzed in the book.

Julie Hansen is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages at Uppsala University (https://www.katalog.uu.se/profile/?id=N10-225) and a specialist in comparative literature and Slavic literature. She received her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and has edited special issues and written numerous articles on literary multilingualism and translation.

 Professor Cathie Carmichael ‘A lost world: the Habsburg garrison in Trebinje’

Tuesday, 10 October, 5pm

Earlham Hall 0.12

All Welcome

East European refreshments provided

Habsburg power was imposed upon Ottoman Bosnia and Hercegovina in 1878. Although the Trebinje citadel surrendered, there was resistance elsewhere.  A new garrison was constructed, rapidly transforming Trebinje into a tree-lined city dominated by the army. In 1882, local guerrillas, mostly Orthodox, targeted the regime’s vulnerabilities but were rapidly defeated. Hospitals, cisterns, schools, roads, and railways were then built and educated soldiers produced new work on botany, geology, or archaeology in their spare time. There were peaceful years, but the 1914 assassination of Franz Ferdinand led to more persecution of the Orthodox.  Border villages were burnt, people executed in public or deported to camps. Slowly the infrastructure failed, partly because shepherds had been attacked; food shortages and news of military defeats left the Habsburg population beleaguered and they left rapidly at the end of 1918.