THREE PUBLIC LECTURES
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Sidney Smith Hall, 100 St. George Street, Room 1071
Presenter: Dr. Epp Annus
Senior Researcher, Estonian Literature Museum
Lecturer, Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures,
Ohio State University
Title: What is home? The experience of Soviet Estonian home-life in the 1970s and 1980s.
Abstract:
This presentation considers the dynamics of Soviet everyday home life in the Baltic states as a dialectics of the tangible and the imaginary: home is at once the tangible experience of the everyday and, at the same time, it is also an imperfect actualization of an imaginary place. In the Baltics, local ethnicities tended to live within the sphere of a comparative home-life – that is, they split and shared their time and energy between different home-spheres: (1) a tiny, standardized Soviet-era apartment in the city (a phenomenon of the 1960s-1980s); (2) a worn-out farmsite or a small-town home an hour or more away with aging relatives and an imagined sense of origins; and (3) from the mid-1960s, perhaps also a never-quite-finished summer-cottage on the outskirts of the modern city. These three homescapes were acknowledged as three dominants within the culturally accepted homing model.
Monday, November 21, 2016
10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Lash Miller Chemical Labs, 80 St. George Street, Room 162
Presenter: Dr. Kaarel Piirimäe
Research Fellow, Institute of History and Archaeology
University of Tartu
Title: A Country at a Critical Juncture: Historical Consciousness, and the Struggle over Estonian Foreign Policy, 1990–1991
Abstract:
The lecture will be about the influence of historical imagination on peoples’ horizons of expectation on the example of the key players in Estonian foreign policy, foreign minister Lennart Meri and prime minister Edgar Savisaar. Dr. Piirimäe will argue that individuals play a key role at “critical junctures”, so the decisions that Meri and Savisaar made in the crucial years of 1990-1991 probably influenced Estonia’s path of development for a long time.
Thursday, November 24, 2016
3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Lash Miller Chemical Labs, 80 St. George Street, Room 159
Presenter: Dr. Andres Kasekamp
Professor of Baltic Politics, Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu
Deputy Director, Estonian Foreign Policy Institute, Tallinn
Title: Baltic cooperation: past and present
Abstract:
The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania tend to be viewed from the outside as a single entity. Nevertheless, they have quite distinct identities and occasionally conflicting interests. Cooperation among Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians has achieved spectacular successes, such as the Baltic human chain in 1989, but has also been undermined by rivalries. This presentation will examine the various forms and structures of political cooperation between these three nations from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, encompassing the establishment of independent states in 1918, World War II, Soviet rule, the Singing Revolution and the restoration of independence, and finally, membership of the European Union and NATO. Their relationship with Russia is a crucial variable in the analysis of each of these periods. The presentation concludes with a discussion of contemporary challenges.
