Research and Teaching

Research and teaching constitute integral parts of the core activities of Blinken OSA. In previous years our educational activities were conducted in the headquarters of the Archives or in other buildings of the CEU campus; in 2017 our colleagues were teaching courses in foreign countries, too, thus further emphasizing the international significance of the intellectual capacities of the institution.

Teaching

István Rév, Director of Blinken OSA, as part of his sabbatical leave in the 2016-17 academic year, spent the first half of the 2017 at the University of California, Berkeley. He was Senior Visiting Research Fellow at Social Science Matrix, and Visiting Professor at the History Department, where he taught a PhD seminar titled Self-Accusatory Practices. After his return, he taught the course Historical Credibility of Self-Accusatory Practices at the CEU Department of History in the fall semester of the academic year 2017-18.

Csaba Szilágyi as a guest lecturer taught a class via Skype at the Department of Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles, titled Locating and Using Records as Evidence in Human Rights Activities. He was Teaching Fellow, together with Anikó Kövecsi, at the Open Learning Initiative Program at CEU offered to refugees and asylum seekers in Hungary. The classes were about visible thinking practice during  the Cold War in human rights archival context, and digital storytelling.

For the 16th time, in the fall semester of the academic year 2017-18, the multidisciplinary course Archives, Evidence and Human Rights (AEHR) was taught by three staff members of Blinken OSA: Iván Székely, Csaba Szilágyi and András Mink. This course is offered to students at the Departments of Law and History, however, students from other programs are also admitted if the number of registered students permits. This year a  sociology student also participated in the program, which included classes, workshops, and intensive individual research work and consultations. Also, a final essay had to be prepared by each of the 21 participants.

In the spring semester the first group of students started their work in the Archives and Evidentiary Practices Specialization developed and provided by Blinken OSA. The three parts of this specialization are the AEHR course itself, during which the students learn how to use the archives as researchers, the archival practice, in the course of which students become familiar with the professional tasks of the archivists who serve researchers, and the intensive coursework, during which they deepen their knowledge of certain problems of the work of archivists. In the second and third phases several colleagues from Blinken OSA staff participated as teaching fellows, under the leadership of Csaba Szilágyi. All the three students who took this specialization completed the course successfully and  handed in their essay.

Oksana Sarkisova, together with CEU Library Media and Visual Education Specialist Jeremy Bravermen, developed and taught a new course called Historical Narratives and Moving Image at the Department of History of CEU in the winter semester of 2017. She also taught a course for the Legal Studies Department, titled Human Rights and Documentary Cinema, together with Renata Uitz. Anna Mazanik also participated in the educational portfolio that Blinken OSA offers to the Department of History, and taught two courses in the fall semester of 2017: Urban History and Culture, a mandatory elective MA course, and Russian Source Reading in Historiography,  an elective MA course.

 An important extension of Blinken OSA’s teaching activities was the launch of a training course for secondary school history teachers in January-April 2017. In the 30-hour course, organized under the title Scopes and Constraints in 20th Century Hungarian History, 16 teachers participated under the leadership of András Mink, with the contribution of historian Krisztián Ungváry.

Research

Members of the Blinken OSA community who are active in research have produced following publications and conference presentations in 2017:

Oksana Sarkisova’s book summarizing her earlier research, Screening Soviet Nationalities: Kulturfilms from the Far North to Central Asia, was published in 2017. The Hungarian version's launch was organized in Blinken OSA, the UK launch took place during the Annual Convention of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) in London, and another book launch was organized in Saint-Petersburg. She continued her research into Soviet vernacular photography in cooperation with Professor Olga Shevchenko (Williams College). An overview of the project appeared in NYT OpEd

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/opinion/sunday/-soviet-union-one-photos.html

as “Remembering Life in the Soviet Union, One Family Photo at a Time” on December 27, 2017.

 Csaba Szilágyi’s ongoing research projects include Documenting Mass Atrocities for Reconciliation: The Role of Human Rights Archives in (In)Forming Memory Practices in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina Blinken OSA, and Human Rights Archives and the Global Refugee Experience.

Anna Mazanik conducted research in Climate Change and Environmental Narratives in the Official and Underground Soviet Media. The project is based on OSA collections and so far has resulted in an article for a collective volume called Russian Imaginings of Climate: Past and Present, to be published in the Routledge Environmental Humanities series.

András Mink continued his research into collecting documents on the history of the great transformation of the political system with the aim of publishing the sources in book form.

Iván Székely, as part of his long-standing multidisciplinary research activities, published his study Do Archives Have a Future in the Digital Age? in the special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, titled Governance of Digital Memories in the Era of Big Data. A Hungarian version of the study was published in Információs Társadalom [Information Society].

 Each of the conferences and workshops organized by Blinken OSA involves preparatory research, the results of which are presented at these professional events. An outstanding event of this type in 2017 was the two-day centennial symposium Spectrum of Communism, organized in conjunction with Verzio 14 and with support of CEU ACRO, in which several colleagues participated either as speakers or moderators. The participants discussed social mechanisms that made new critical theories possible, as well as their current position within a post-crisis context marked by the success of the populist right.

Besides in-house professional events, Blinken OSA staff members participated in several international conferences and workshops in 2017, too. Oksana Sarkisova presented her paper Nationalizing Dirt and Disease on the Screen: Soviet Kulturfilms and the Creation of a Perfect Ethnic Body at the Annual Convention of the Association for the Studies of Nationalities, Harriman Institute at Columbia University; she presented the paper A Private Touch: Soviet-era Family Photographs in Contemporary Art and Documentary Film (with Olga Shevchenko) at the Art versus Document: Photography in Modern Russian History conference held at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow; she presented her paper 100 Years of Russian Revolution in Arts and Aesthetics at Södertörn University and Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and she was the convener and participant of the round table “The National Frame: New Research on Representing Nationalities in Soviet Cinema” and also a discussant on the panel dedicated to Sergei Tretiakov at the Association of the Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), Chicago.

Csaba Szilágyi gave a presentation at the Archival Education and Research Institute, Toronto, titled “The stories of ordinary people… are more powerful than anything politicians can say”: Affective archivists re-figure (the former) Yugoslavia through historical records.

Anna Mazanik delivered her presentation Russia between Wars and Revolutions at the European University at St. Petersburg, where she also gave an invited talk titled Memory and the Archive: Radio Liberty Collections and Soviet History.

Anikó Kövecsi presented her paper Accessing documentary films: Festivals and beyond at the Annual conference of Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago.

Iván Székely delivered his presentation What can be learned from former new democracies? at the workshop on (Big) Hopes and Hazards of Big Data, organized at CEU.