27th Annual
UG Conference Program (2024)
TWENTY SEVENTH ANNUAL UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA UNDERGRADUATE CONFERENCE
ON SLAVIC AND EAST/CENTRAL EUROPEAN STUDIES
Saturday, April 27, 2024
Please note: Times are all in Pacific Time Zone (PDT)
8:00-8:45 am Check-in. Coffee and bagels/pastries
8:45-9:00 am Opening Remarks by Igor Pilshchikov, Chair of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Literatures, UCLA
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Panel 1: 9:00-9:55 am
Mirroring the Paradigm of the 18th-19th centuries Russian Culture
Chair: Elena Makarova (UCLA)
Maya Shkolnik (Columbia University / Visiting Student at Oxford University) –
“Anna Karenina’s Decline: Her Self-Enclosure as a Decadent Parable”
Madeline Muller (Bryn Mawr College) – “Concurrent Polyphony through Combat in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons and Toni Morrison’s Paradise”
Tessa Lippmann (Bryn Mawr College) – “The Winter Palace: its symbology throughout
Russian and Soviet eras”
Panel 2: 10:00-10:40 am
Issues in Bilingualism
Chair: Emma Montilla (UCLA)
Tadas Račkauskas (USC) – “Exploring the Interaction of Lithuanian-English Code Switching with Case Declension and Syntactic Structure: A Matrix Language Frame Model Analysis”
Amy Cabrales (UCLA) – “Motivations and Identity Relationships with the Russian Language Among UCLA Heritage Speakers of Russian”
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COFFEE BREAK: 10:40 – 10:50 am
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Panel 3: 10:50-11:45
Conceptualizing early 20th-century Russian Literature
Chair: Lydia Roberts (UCLA)
Ava Ratcliff (UC Berkeley) — “Reconceiving the Marian Mother in ‘We’ by Yevgeny Zamyatin and ‘The Mother’ by Maxim Gorky”
Joshua Darrish (UC Santa Barbara) – “Healing the Imperial Scar: Exploring the Role of Jewish Diasporic Tikkun Olam in Babel’s Konarmiya”
Kelly Nguyen (UCLA) – “A Utopian Mirage: The Disconnect Between Theoretical Ideals and Practical Realities of Socialism in Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur”
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LUNCH: 11:45-12:45 pm
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Panel 4: 12:45-1:40 pm
Soviet Prose Challenging the Regime Chair:
Sasha Razor (UC Santa Barbara)
Guy Yegudin (UC Santa Barbara) – “Out of Place and Out of Time: The Plight of the Intellectual Under Totalitarian Regimes as Depicted in the Novels of Bulgakov and Nabokov”
Alina Tszyan (UC Santa Barbara) – “The Self in Peril in Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov”
Zachary Richardson (UCLA) – “Doctor Zhivago, Alexander Blok’s The Twelve, and Boris Pasternak’s philosophy of a great artist”
Panel 5: 1:45-2:40 pm
Cross-Cultural Relationships: in Search for Identities
Chair: Cooper Lynn (UCLA)
Michael O’Connell (Haverford College) – «“The smell of the Rus’ is in the air”: White emigres and the American Rus’ at ROVA Farms, 1934-1976»
Katharina Hass (UC Berkeley) – “The Monument to the Treaty of Georgievsk: a Georgian Monumental Mosaic and the Soviet Friendship of the Peoples”
Tyler Armstrong (UCLA) – «“You Sent for Me, Comrade Leader?”: How Marvel’s Black Widow Characterizes Russian Identity as Inferior to American Identity»
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COFFEE BREAK 2:40-3:00 pm
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Panel 6: 3:00-4:10 pm
Focus on the Balkans: Politics, Migration, Youth
Chair: Sylvie Vidan (UCLA)
Kenan Čačković (UCLA) – “Environmental Implications of Political Mismanagement in Bosnia and Herzegovina”
Doris Butković (UCLA) – “The Inheritance of Memory: Generational Trauma in Post- Yugoslav Communities”
Aliyah McCoy (UCLA) – “Remnants of War: The Mass Emigration of Bosnian Youth” Paloma Gasparov (UCLA) – “The Brain Drain Paradigm on Bulgarian Youth”
Panel 7: 4:15-5:10 pm
“Imperial Shadow”: Some Outcomes of Russia’s Politics
Chair: Yelena Furman (UCLA)
Cheyenne Hawkins (UCLA) – “Parallel Histories: A Comparative Analysis of Crimean Tatar Persecution under Stalin and Putin”
Elise Keller and Fernanda Varelas Ramirez (UC Santa Barbara) – “A Comparison of Vladimir Putin’s Interviews with American and Russian Reporters”
Kareena Dhillon (UC Santa Barbara) – “From Cold War Legacies to Modern Ambitions: Russia’s Role in West Africa”
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5:15-5:30 pm Closing Remarks & Presentation of Certificates: Tanya Ivanova- Sullivan (UCLA) and Larry McLellan (UCSB)