TWENTY FOURTH ANNUAL UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
UNDERGRADUATE CONFERENCE
ON SLAVIC AND EAST/CENTRAL EUROPEAN STUDIES
Saturday, April 24, 2021
9:00-9:10 am Opening Remarks: Gail Lenhoff, Acting Chair of the Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures, UCLA
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9:20-10:40 am Session 1 Panel A: 19th Century Literature: Marginality and Geography
Chair: Elena Makarova
Elen Karapetyan (UCLA) “Russian Architecture as Reflected in 19th Century Russian Literature: From Karamzin to Dostoevsky”
Molly Burhans (Indiana University Bloomington) “The Real Women of Pushkin and Turgenev: Self, Sex, & Power”
Gemma Taylor (UCLA) “Foreign Foundations of Nation: Imperialism and the Development of the Russian Nation in A Hero of Our Time”
Cate Hyojin Hwang (UCSB) “Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island: Exile as the Abandonment of Knowing”
9:20-10:20 am Session 1 Panel B: Topics in Russian and Soviet History
Chair: Lydia Roberts
Juliette Oliver (UCLA) “Greeted with Poems by Pushkin: An Exploration of the Significant Afro-Russia Immigration Waves and their Public Perceptions”
De’Vonte Tinsley (Virginia Polytechnic Institute) “Руководство Большевиков и Государства в Гражданской войне”
Natalia San Antonio (Bryn Mawr College) “The Impact of Politics on Scientific Progress in the Soviet Union”
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10:40-11:00 am BREAK
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11:00 am-12:00 pm Session 2 Panel A: 20th Century Literature & Literary Theory: Interpretation, Application, Translation
Chair: Peter Winsky
R. Conrad Salonites (UCLA) “An Introduction to Psychogeographic Discourses in Bely’s Petersburg”
Peter Bota (UCLA) “’In the Shadow of the Apocalypse’: Humanism, Ideology, and Samizdat in Postwar Romania”
Alexandra Stewart (Portland State University) “On the Propp-Levi Strauss debate: Applying Propp’s functions to Jane Austen”
11:00-12:00 pm Session 2 Panel B: Approaches to the Study of Music and Linguistics in Former Yugoslavia, Russia and Eastern Europe
Chair: Cooper Lynn
Mina Cvjetinovic and Nikola Nikolic (UCLA) “Music as a Dividing and Unifying Force in the Ex-Yugoslav Republics”
Sebastián Arce Rentería (Los Angeles Harbor College) “Predecessors of the Written Art”
Spencer Bonneteau (UCSD) “Comparative Slavic Phonology: Palatalization and Vowel Reflexes”
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12:20-1:00 pm LUNCH
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1:00-2:20 pm Session 3 Panel A: Conflict, Change, and Environmental Issues in Contemporary Politics
Chair: Polina Varfolomeeva
Vlad Manzhyliy (UCLA) “Russia and United States: Race for the Arctic”
Katherine Tsai and Sarah Alkidim (UCLA) “Has Lake Baikal Become Befouled?: A Review and Analysis of Environmental Pollutants in the World’s Largest Freshwater Lake Over The Past 30 Years”
Joseph Matveyenko (UCLA) “Regime Change and Election Integrity in Post-Soviet Ukraine and Armenia”
Jonathan Vukovic (UCLA) “How Religion Shaped National Identity in the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s”
1:00-2:00 pm Session 3 Panel B: Economic Investment and Political Control in Central Asia and Latin America
Chair: Yana Demeshko
Moriah Thomas (University of Georgia) “Kazakhstan in the Middle”
Jennifer Leo (Portland State University) “The Remission and Reappearance of Moscow’s Economic Hegemony in Central Asia”
Natalie Navarrete (University of Georgia) “Russian Holistic Investment in Latin America: A Counter to the Security Interests of the United States”
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2:20 pm Closing Remarks & Presentation of Certificates: Larry McLellan,
Department of Germanic, Slavic, & Semitic Studies, UCSB