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ISEEES Hires New Executive Director
The Sixteenth Annual Symposium of SOYUZ
ISEEES Events Listserv
Announcement of a new Executive Director
The Search Committee of ISEEES is pleased to announce the University approval of the appointment of its top-ranked candidate, Jeffrey Pennington, as Executive Director of the Institute. Jeff has accepted the position and will effectively begin on January 14, 2008. (Barbara Voytek will be around to help with the transition so you can continue to contact her about ongoing events or issues.)
Jeffrey comes to us from Indiana University, Bloomington, where he has been serving as the assistant director/outreach coordinator of the European Union Center of Excellence, one of ten EU Centers in the US. Prior to this, he worked as assistant director/outreach coordinator of the Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center at Indiana, one of the US Department of Education Title VI national resource centers. In addition, Jeff has experience in the non-profit management field in Bucharest, Romania, and international education experience in Eastern Europe. He holds a BS in Foreign Service from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and an MA in East European Studies from Indiana. He is fluent in Romanian and has a good command of Hungarian and Japanese. He acquired PhD candidate status in February 2007 at the Graduate School of International Cooperation Studies at Kobe University (Japan). His dissertation topic is Japanese-East European relations in the interwar period
The Sixteenth Annual Symposium of SOYUZ
The Sixteenth Annual Symposium of SOYUZ entitled “Contemporary Critical Inquiry Through the Lens of Postsocialism” will take place at the University of California, Berkeley from April 24 to April 26, 2008.
The disintegration of Soviet and Eastern European socialisms not only ushered in rapid and overwhelming transformations in the former socialist lifeworlds, but also engendered the emergence of the problem-space of “postsocialism” that spans well beyond the boundaries of the former socialist states. In this year’s Soyuz conference, we would like to consider: how can theoretical insights gained in our critical engagements with postsocialism shed new light on questions central to contemporary anthropology and critical social inquiry more broadly.
The selected papers interrogate the relevance of the theoretical insights gained in engagements with postsocialism for other contexts, areas and problems of contemporary world. They will consider the implications of postsocialism, both as a historical formation and as a problem-space, for the problems interrogated in contemporary anthropology and social inquiry.
The conference organizing committee:
Alexei Yurchak (UC Berkeley)
Dominic Boyer (Cornell)
Dace Dzenovska (UC Berkeley)
Larisa Kurtovic (UC Berkeley)
Alex Beliaev (UC Berkeley)
Nina Aron (UC Berkeley)
The symposium is generously sponsored by the UC Berkeley Institute for Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies, the Townsend Center for Humanities, Dean of the Social Sciences Division in the College of Letters and Science at UC Berkeley, Berkeley Department of Anthropology, AGORA, and Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers (KAS).
SOYUZ is the Research Network of Postsocialist Cultural Studies, a research group affiliated with AAASS and the American Anthropological Association
For more information, and for conference schedule, please see http://ias.berkeley.edu/soyuz.
Events Listserv
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