Registration REQUIRED by 12pm on April 11, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a panel discussion with Marina Bykova, Caryl Emerson, and Mikhail Epstein. Moderated by Mark Lipovetsky.
The Russia-Ukraine war has triggered an urgent need to reevaluate the historical, cultural, and philosophical forces driving this devastating conflict. “At the Vanishing Point in History: Critical Perspectives on the Russia-Ukraine War” is a comprehensive collection of analytical essays and articles that delve into the underlying causes and historical context of the ongoing conflict in Eastern Europe. This volume brings together humanities scholars and prominent novelists, who are Russian émigrés with deep expertise in Russian culture, history, and philosophy. Their collective insights aim to dissect the roots of the current crisis, offering essential background and context to better understand the unfolding events in the region.
The contributors critically assess the trajectory of Russia’s political landscape, emphasizing the urgent need to investigate the true origins of its aggressive actions. They argue that the atrocities committed in the name of the “Russian world” not only endanger Ukraine but pose a significant threat to global civilization. By examining the past, this work seeks to illuminate the present situation and propose pathways for future research in the humanities, with the goal of uncovering solutions to this pressing international issue.
For more on the book, see:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/at-the-vanishing-point-in-history-9781350438309/
Marina F. Bykova is a Professor of Philosophy at North Carolina State University (USA) and the Editor-in-Chief of Studies in East European Thought. Her main area of specialization is the history of the nineteenth century continental philosophy, with a focus on German idealism, especially on Fichte and Hegel. Her most recent books include The German Idealism Reader: Ideas, Responses and Legacies (Bloomsbury, 2019), Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit: A Critical Guide (ed., Cambridge University Press, 2019), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Fichte (ed., Bloomsbury, 2020), and The Palgrave Hegel Handbook (co-ed. with K. Westphal; Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). She has also published books on Russian intellectual tradition, including Philosophical Thought in Russia in the Second Half of the 20th Century: A Contemporary Views from Russia and Abroad (co-ed. with V.A. Lektorsky; Bloomsbury, 2019) and The Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought (co-ed. with M. Forster and L. Steiner; Palgrave MacMillan, 2021). Her new book, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: A Critical Guide is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
Mikhail Epstein is a philosopher and a cultural and literary scholar. He is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Emeritus Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University. He served as a professor at Emory University from 1990 to 2023. From 2012 to 2015, he served as professor and founding director of the Centre for Humanities Innovation at Durham University (UK). His research interests include new directions in the humanities, contemporary philosophy and religion, the poetics and history of Russian literature, postmodernism, and the evolution of language. He has authored fifty books and over 1,000 articles and essays. His works have been translated into twenty-six languages. Among his latest books are The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto (Bloomsbury, 2012); The Irony of the Ideal: Paradoxes of Russian Literature (Academic Studies Press, 2017); The Phoenix of Philosophy: Russian Thought of the Late Soviet Period, 1953‒1991 (Bloomsbury, 2019); and Ideas Against Ideocracy: Non-Marxist Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953–1991) (Bloomsbury, 2022). He is a recipient of the Andrei Bely Award (St. Petersburg, 1991), the prize of the London Institute of Social Inventions for intellectual creativity (1995), the Liberty Prize (New York, 2000), and the Modern Language Association Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for the best book in Slavic studies (US, 2023).
Caryl Emerson is A. Watson Armour III University Professor Emerita of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. Her scholarship has focused on the Russian classics (Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky), Mikhail Bakhtin, and Russian music, opera and theater. Recent projects include the French Neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain and the interwar Russian diaspora (philosophers and creative artists), the Russian modernist prose writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950), the allegorical-historical novelist Vladimir Sharov (1952-2018), and the co-editing, with George Pattison and Randall A. Poole, of The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought (2020).
Mark Lipovetsky is Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University. His research interests include Russian postmodernism, New Drama, Soviet literary and cinematic tricksters, Soviet underground culture as well as various aspects of post-Soviet culture. He is the author of twelve monographs and two hundred articles. He is one of coauthors of the “Oxford History of Russian Literature” (2018). In 2022, Lipovetsky published a monograph “A Guerilla Logos: The Project of Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov” (co-authored with Ilya Kukulin); he also curated the publication of Prigov’s five-volume collected works at NLO Press in Moscow. He also co-edited twenty collections of articles on Russian literature and culture of the 20th-21st centuries, including volumes on Dmitry Prigov, Vladimir Sorokin, Vladimir Sharov, and the “Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture” (2024). Lipovetsky is a recipient of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages award for the outstanding contribution to scholarship (2014) and Andrey Belyi Prize (2019). At Columbia University, Lipovetsky runs the Contemporary Culture Series that includes talks, conversations and symposia on most significant aspects of contemporary Russophone culture.
