Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on April 7, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute and the Department of Slavic Languages for a lecture by Julia Vaingurt, the latest installment of the William E. Harkins Colloquium. Moderated by Konstantin Mitroshenkov.
Julia Vaingurt is a professor in the Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. She has published widely on Russian modernism and avant-garde, including a book, “Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and Arts in Russia of the 1920s,” and an edited volume, “The Human Reimagined: Posthumanism in Russia” (together with Colleen McQuillen). Her most recent book, “Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late-Soviet Socialism,” published by Northwestern University Press, examines a poetics of weakness in Soviet underground literature. Julia Vaingurt argues that this counter-discourse of strategic weakness constituted both an aesthetic strategy and an ethical code, affording like-minded authors a feeling of recognition and commonality and uniting an international community of artists in resistance to the divisiveness of their worlds. “Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism” explores the cultivation of weak subjectivity through modes such as gender subversion, queer holy foolishness, intoxication, madness, and writing disorders like graphomania and writer’s block. Identifying the poetics of weakness as formative for Soviet underground literature of the 1960s and ’70s, Vaingurt also traces the inheritance of a far older tradition of salutary weakness within Russian culture. As democratic deliberation continues to be under threat around the world, alternatives to the ubiquitous politics of force are an aesthetic, ethical, and ideological imperative.
About the William E. Harkins Colloquium
William Harkins was an expert in many areas and a versatile and innovative Slavist. In honor of his multifaceted contribution, the Department of Slavic Languages has established a colloquium that celebrates the cultural as well as disciplinary variety within the Slavic field. The Harkins Colloquium, run by graduate students, provides a forum beyond the classroom in which they pursue their intellectual interests. The aim is to reimagine Slavic studies both by drawing our own faculty and students together and by enhancing links to individuals and groups beyond the department.
Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.
