Penny M. Von Eschen is a Professor of History and the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American Studies at at the University of Virginia. Her most recent book is Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder Since 1989 (Duke University Press, 2022).
Focusing on U.S.-Russian memory wars over Soviet Era and Imperial histories, Professor Von Eschen's talk will juxtapose U.S. triumphalist victor's history with Russian shifts from critical to mythic nostalgia, the later exemplified in shifting representations of the Soviet past and U.S.-Russian relations at the Political Museum in St. Petersburg. The elevation of victim's history and mythic nostalgia has been critical to the rise of the right in Eastern Europe, the United States, and globally. The talk will further explore how cultural conservatives and authoritarians in Russia and the United States worked together at the very moment of the "new cold war" and growing hostilities over the expansion of NATO.
CAC Academic Building, Room 6051
November 17, 2022, 4:00 p.m.