April 7, 2008
2:30 p.m.
Hill Freeman Library and Spruill Learning Center, top floor
Community Invited to Hear “Gender, Identity, and
Memory: Patterns of Survival among Women in the Stalinist Gulag”
on April 7 at 2:30 p.m. as part of Reinhardt College’s “Year of
Eastern Europe and Russia”
As part of Reinhardt
College’s Year of Eastern Europe and Russia, the public is
invited to hear Dr. Elaine McKinnon of the University of West
Georgia present “Gender, Identity, and Memory: Patterns of
Survival Among Women in the Stalinist Gulag” on April 7, 2008,
at 2:30 p.m., on the top level of the Hill Freeman Library and
Spruill Learning Center. This event is offered free of charge.
McKinnon, a
professor of history, has taught at West Georgia since the fall
of 1995. She has a doctorate in Modern European History from
Emory University and a Bachelor of Arts in Slavic Languages and
Literatures from Princeton University. She has published
articles on Soviet historians under Stalin, on the independent
press in the Soviet Union, and on Soviet historical writing
during the Gorbachev era and the ways in which politics and
historiography intertwined.
She will be lecturing at
Reinhardt on a research topic that is new for her: survival in
the Stalinist forced labor camp system, or ‘Gulag’ as it has
commonly come to be known. “The focus… will be specifically
women in the camps during the period 1929 to 1953. I will
discuss basic patterns and strategies of survival that emerge
from survivors’ memoirs, identifying which of these patterns and
strategies were gendered, and which were common to both female
and male survivors. I also want to highlight two or three
specific memoirs and examine issues related to survival,
historical memory and the nature of memoir writing.”
McKinnon sees this research topis as incredibly rich and
compelling topic for a number of reasons. “Study of the Gulag
illuminates a key dimension of the Soviet system that became in
many respects a microcosm of the larger society, in somewhat
perverted yet painfully stark terms,” she said. “Though not
unfamiliar to people, thanks to the works of… survivors, the
current situation in Russian politics threatens to bury the
truth of the Stalin period, and all such efforts must be
resisted. It is also a story that can resonate with those who
have studied and are familiar with the Holocaust, as part of the
frightening legacy of 20th-century genocide and
institutionalized human exploitation and degradation. Finally,
it draws us in because it is ultimately a very human story about
multiple facets of the human experience, the fragility as well
as the resilience of the human body and mind in the face of
unfathomable hardship, suffering and trauma.”
McKinnon currently has an article under review at the Canadian
Journal of History comparing Mikhail Gorbachev and F.W. de Klerk
as transitional leaders whose very attributes that allowed them
to push through monumental reforms handicapped their ability to
adjust to the new socio-political circumstances created by their
very policies. She also translated and edited Mass Uprisings in
the USSR: Protest and Rebellion in the Post-Stalin Years by
Russian historian Vladimir A. Kozlov, as well as several other
articles on Soviet history by Russian scholars.
She is a
member of various history and Slavic studies groups such as the
Association of Women in Slavic Studies and the Southeast World
History Association and is fluent in both Russian and German.
For more
information on Reinhardt College’s Year of Eastern Europe and
Russia, please see www.reinhardt.edu/YEER/index.htm
For more information
on the Year of Eastern Europe and Russia
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