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Conferences | Events | Panels & Roundtables | Russia | Video | Virtual Events

Date

Starts: September 24, 2026 at 12:00 AM
Ends: September 26, 2026 at 11:59 PM

Location

Calder Lounge at Uris Hall
First Floor, Room 107, Uris Hall, 3022 Broadway, New York, NY 10027, United States
Systematic Disorder: Russian Culture Under Neoliberalism

Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on September 23, 2026 in order to attend this event.

Please join the Harriman Institute for the conference Systematic Disorder: Russian Culture Under Neoliberalism, organized by Daria Ezerova (University of Cambridge) and Mark Lipovetsky (Columbia University).

Conference Program

Day One: Thursday, September 24: Calder Lounge, Uris Hall 107, 3022 Broadway

Reserve Your Seat for Day 1 Register for Zoom Webinar

6:00pm | Discussion of the Book Russia’s New Imperialism: Capital and Ideology (Stanford University Press, 2026)

Authors Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev In conversation with Nancy Condee (University of Pittsburgh)

Day Two: Friday, September 25: Calder Lounge, Uris Hall 107, 3022 Broadway

Reserve Your Seat for Day 2 Register for Zoom Webinar

9:30am: Opening Remarks

Daria Ezerova (University of Cambridge)

9:45 – 11:45am | Panel 1: Late Socialism

Chair: Yana Skorobogatov (Columbia University)

  • Kevin M.F. Platt (University of Pennsylvania), On Making Literature, Making Waves, and Making Money: Soviet Authors Between Non-Conformism and Capitalism
  • Zachary Hicks (Princeton University), Objective Form and the Time of Late Socialism: Late Soviet Cinema and the Making of the Neoliberal Present
  • Jinyi Chu (Yale University), Startup, Soviet Style: Reimagining Cooperatives During Perestroika
  • Juliane Fürst (CEU/ZZF, Potsdam), When Homo Sovieticus Became Adventurous: The Perestroika Press and its Creation of the Delovoi Chelovek

12:00 – 1:30pm | Panel 2: Institutions

Chair: Hringur Asgeir Sigurdarson (Columbia University)

  • Eva Ivanilova (University of Pittsburgh), Indigeneity and Capital in Post-Soviet Russia
  • Margarita Kuleva (New York University), Building a Stateless Oasis: Workers of Russian Private Cultural Institutions Between Grassroots Neoliberalism and Governmental Control
  • Vlad Strukov (University of Leeds), Neoliberal Utopia: Museums (of Contemporary Art) as Ideologues of Extractivism and Militarism

2:45 – 4:45pm | Panel 3: Gender and Care

Chair: Tatiana Krasilnikova (Columbia University)

  • Alexey Golubev (University of Houston), Before Neoliberalism: Medical Literacy and Technocratic Turn in Late Soviet Society
  • Victoria Buyanovskaya (Dickinson College), Learned Helplessness: Neoliberalism, the Crisis of Care, and Caring Narratives in Oksana Vasyakina’s Steppe
  • Elena Gapova (Western Michigan University), The Feminism of Our Discontent: On Sex, (mis)Trust, and Contract
  • Lilya Kaganovsky (University of California, Los Angeles), Post-Soviet Feminism Between State Socialism and Global Neoliberalism

5:00 – 6:30pm | Keynote Address

Masha Salazkina (Concordia University), “A Band from the Caribbean Islands”: Boney M and the Global Popular Imagination of Late Socialism

Day Three: Saturday, September 26: Calder Lounge, Uris Hall 107, 3022 Broadway

Reserve Your Seat for Day 3 Register for Zoom Webinar

9:30 – 11:00am | Panel 4: Patriotic Culture Industry

Chair: Aleksandar Momčilović (Columbia University)

  • Eliot Borenstein (New York University), Even Neoliberals Get the Blues: Post-Soviet Melancholy for the Masses
  • Oleg Kashirskikh (Weizenbaum Institute, Berlin); Jeremy Morris (Aarhus University), The Cultural Production of Wartime Normality: Authoritarian Neoliberalism as a Regime of Truth in Contemporary Russia
  • Michał Murawski (University College London), From Culture Tree to Culture Z: Russian Architecture in the Age of Authoritarian Neoliberalism

11:15am – 12:45pm | Panel 5: Literature and Theater

Chair: Konstantin Mitroshenkov (Columbia University)

  • Bradley Gorski (Georgetown University), Neoliberal Irreality
  • Edward Tyerman (University of California, Berkeley), Eternal Crisis of the Peripheral Empire: Vladimir Sorokin’s World System
  • Natalia Plagmann (Middlebury College), Stages of Labor: Dreamworlds, Struggles, and Experiments of Russian Theater in Neoliberal Times

1:30 – 3:00pm | Panel 6: Contemporary Art

Chair: Liza Senatorova (Columbia University)

  • Klavdia Smola (Technische Universität Dresden), The Double Bind of Dissent: Reimagining the Soviet Left under Russian Authoritarian Neoliberalism
  • Maksim Hanukai (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Curing Capitalism: The Conceptualist Pharmacy in the Time of Transition
  • Nora Furlong (University of Oxford), Ultranationalist Art and an Ostensibly Ironic Audience: Alexey Belyaev-Gintovt and the Politics of Post-Soviet Aesthetics

3:15 – 5:15pm | Panel 7: Popular Culture

Chair: Nathan Goldstone (Columbia University)

  • Ilya Kalinin (Humboldt University, Berlin), The Neoliberal Time Loop: From the Privatization of the Past to the Monopolization of the Future
  • Zachary Murphy King (Bilkent University), In Media Res: Santa Barbara and the Cultural Translation of Neoliberalism in the Post-Soviet World
  • Tatiana Efremova (The George Washington University), Shortparis and the Post-Soviet (Re)Creative Class
  • Marijeta Bozovic (Yale University), Hacking Democracy: Russian Hackers as Myth and Machine

5:30 – 7:00pm | Panel 8: Neoliberal Dialectics

Chair: Adam Leeds (Columbia University)

  • Marina Bykova (North Carolina State University), Neoliberalism and the Transformation of Russian Philosophical Culture
  • Artemi Magun (Bard College), Neoliberalism? Really?
  • Keti Chukhrov (Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart), Can Post-Socialist Techno-Feudalism Be Neoliberal?
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