CHORUS & hps.cesee global book talk: Soviet SCI_BERIA

 CHORUS & hps.cesee global book talk: Soviet SCI_BERIA. Thursday, April 24, 10:00 am ET / 16:00 CET / 17:00 Kyiv, Zoom.

ABOUT THIS EVENT

Virtual platforms CHORUS (Colloquium for the History of Russian and Soviet Science) & HPS.CESEE (History of Science in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe) are inviting you to the forthcoming discussion of a new book on the history of Soviet science cities. Katja Doose and Ivan Boldyrev will join Ksenia Tatarchenko to comment on her recent book: Soviet SCI_BERIA: The Politics of Expertise and the Novosibirsk Scientific Center [1], in a discussion moderated by Slava Gerovitch.

Thursday, April 24, 10:00 am ET / 16:00 CET / 17:00 Kyiv, Zoom.

The meeting is free and open to the public. To receive the Zoom link, please register here: https://forms.gle/cikxo7tqhDXwSh7b9 or write to hps.cesee@gmail.com.

[1] Soviet SCI_BERIA: The Politics of Expertise and the Novosibirsk Scientific Center. London: Bloomsbury Academic 2024.

“At first glance, the Novosibirsk Scientific Center, or Akademgorodok, appears as an outlier in academic excellence. This 'science city' is renowned for a preeminent university, dozens of research institutes, and a thriving technopark. At home, it is an emblem of Russian innovation; abroad, it is often portrayed as a potential threat, a breeding ground of cyber soldiers. Though Siberia has been the main source of post-1991 Russian carbon revenues, its soviet history and cold war legacy of internationalism demonstrates that territorial and scientific dimensions interlocked the moment the Siberian Branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences was created in 1957.

Drawing on a wide range of previously unexplored archives, Soviet SCI_BERIA focuses on how the post-Stalinist Siberia was redefined and represented through the ideal of rational development, the late socialist innovation practices, and the relationship between experts and the state. It offers a fresh insight into the transition from Soviet to post-Soviet Akademgorodok. In doing so, Tatarchenko not only fosters a conversation between history, area studies, and science studies but also sheds new light on Soviet modernity and the limits of its transformative projects.”

Participants

Ivan Boldyrev is a philosopher and an historian of ideas, with interests in economics, German idealism, sociology of knowledge, and critical theory. He currently works as assistant professor of history and philosophy of economics at the Radboud University Nijmegen. His most recent publications are (co-edited, with Till Düppe) Economic Knowledge in Socialism, 1945-1989, Annual Supplement to History of Political Economy. Duke University Press, 2019, and Die Ohnmacht des Spekulativen: Elemente einer Poetik von Hegels “Phänomenologie des Geistes.“ Wilhelm Fink, 2021. More information https://ivanboldyrev.net/about.html

Katja Doose is an environmental historian and a historian of science for Russia and the Soviet Union at the University of Lyon and Fribourg. Her research focuses on the history of Russian and Soviet earth science and the experiences of human-nature interactions from the late 19th to the 20th century. She is currently working on her book manuscript entitled "White Coal for white gold. An environmental history of glacier studies in Central Asia". She leads the SNF project "Myths of equality. A gendered history of science in Central Asia, 1870-1970" (2024-2027).  More information: https://www.unifr.ch/directory/en/people/334449/232f7

Ksenia Tatarchenko is a specialist in late Soviet history and the Cold War history of computing and AI. She has taught in the United States, Switzerland, and Singapore, and works currently at the John Hopkins University in Baltimore. She received her Ph.D. from the History of Science Program, History Department, Princeton University (2013). Her dissertation “A House with the Window to the West: The Akademgorodok Computer Center, 1958-1993” was awarded the Charles Babbage Institute 2012-2013 Erwin & Adelle Tomash Fellowship. Her publications include “Algorithm’s Cradle: Commemorating al-Khwarizmi in the Soviet History of Mathematics and Cold War Computer Science,” Osiris 38, 2023, pp. 286-304 and (co-edited, with Grégory Dufaud) Les vies de la science sous le socialisme tardif, 1945-1991. Special issue of Cahiers d’histoire russe, est-européenne, caucasienne et centrasiatique 63/1, 2022. More information: https://smu-sg.academia.edu/KseniaTatarchenko

Slava Gerovitch teaches history of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He holds two PhDs: one in philosophy of science (from the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences and Technology in Moscow) and one in history and social study of science and technology (from MIT's Science, Technology and Society Program). He has written extensively on the history of Soviet mathematics, cybernetics, cosmonautics, and computing. He is the author of From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (2002), Voices of the Soviet Space Program (2014), and Soviet Space Mythologies (2015). More information: https://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage