Join us at CEMS on Friday, October 30, from 4:30 to 6:00 as we welcome essayist Dubravka Ugrešić, speaking on:

“Women, Gender Image Building and Failures of Feminist Movements in Post-Yugoslav States”

The NYU Center for European and Mediterranean Studies is located at 285 Mercer St (Between Waverly and Washington)

Dubravka Ugrešić is a novelist and essayist based in Amsterdam. Ugrešić began her career as an academic and writer at the University of Zagreb’s Institute for Theory of Literature. She was a vocal critic of the war that broke out in the former Yugoslavia in 1991, and left Croatia in 1993. She has held numerous professorships and fellowships including at the Free University of Berlin, Harvard, UCLA, and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. For October 2015, she is in residence at Columbia University in the Department of Slavic Languages.
Ugrešić has received many prizes and awards, including the Jean Améry Essay Prize (Austria/Germany, 2012), the James Tiptree Literary Award (USA, 2010), and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1998). She was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize in 2009.
Ugrešić’s most recent publications in English include: Europe in Sepia (trans. David Williams) University of Rochester: Open Letter Books 2014; Karaoke Culture (trans. David Williams). University of Rochester: Open Letter Books 2011; and Baba Yaga Laid An Egg (trans. Ellen Elias-Bursac, Celia Hawkesworth, Mark Thompson). Edinburgh: Canongate 2009; New York: Grove Press 2010.  Karaoke Culture was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
Source: Dubravka Ugrešić, website: http://www.dubravkaugresic.com/
Photo credit: Zeljko Koprolcec

A reception will follow the talk.

Janet Elise Johnson, Associate Professor, Brooklyn College, CUNY  

Boxing in Fast-Tracked Women:  Lessons from Russia about How Informal Politics Undermine Women’s Representation.

In the last two decades, authoritarian-leaning regimes have been recruiting women into politics; however, this influx has not led to real political advancement for these women or the broader representation of women’s interests. I examine this puzzle through the case of Putin’s Russia, bringing together new subfields of comparative politics, the study of Russia’s regime dynamics and feminist institutionalism.  I show how women are being informally fast-tracked into politics and then boxed in by informal rules, revealing dynamics probably at work in many types of regimes.

Date: October 22, 2015 – 4.15 – 6.15 pm

Place: The Political Science Lounge, Room: 5200,  CUNY Graduate Center